


Lionheart

by cyan96



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Barely Canon Compliant, Bepo is best bear, Donquixote "Corazon" Rosinante Lives, Forward Time Travel, Gen, Law not dealing with his feelings so much as throwing it up all on Cora to deal with, Post Dressrosa, The heart pirate crew watching from the sidelines with 0_0 expressions, celiac trafalgar law, exploratory expansion on backstories, inaccurate depictions of medical procedures, post zou and pre wano, tiny terrier trafalgar law, vs adult disaster trafalgar law
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2019-11-14 18:07:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18057431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyan96/pseuds/cyan96
Summary: The light overhead isn't from Minion island's overcast sky but instead a steel plated ceiling shining down fluorescence, glass and plastic bottles rattling on shelves against the walls. Everywhere there's monitors and familiar machinery and the distinct tang of antiseptic, sharp beyond the memory sense of blood and snow. For half a second Law looks at it all very blankly and thinks, What The Hell. Is he dreaming. Is he hallucinating. Is he just plain dead. His sight-line completes the rotation of this impossibility to fall upon speckled jeans and a long sweeping coat. And the man standing in front of Law has the blankest expression Law's ever seen. And the man standing in front of Law has Law's father's face.Underneath Law's blood-slicked fingers, Cora-san's pulse shudders.(This is a story where the past and the present collide. Wherein thirteen year old Trafalgar Law and twenty-six year old Rocinante tumble sideways through time-space via the blue desperation of a newly eaten devil fruit, from Minion island to a future distant. Right, unwittingly, onto the submarine deck of a another Law shortly after Doflamingo’s fall.)





	1. Law I

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. This fic is set in the 2 week time frame between Zou and Wano, while Luffy is off at the Tea Party from Hell and everyone else is on Route to Wano via the Polar Tang.
> 
> 2\. I'll try to update every week. Chapters will thus be short but hopefully frequent. 
> 
> 3\. Enjoy!

"Sorry, Doffy."

Feathers press against Law's ears and Law's nose. They're all he can see and all he can feel, damp and smelling vaguely of charcoal and cigarette smoke over the sharply biting cold. Law claws at them, frantic, feeling fistfuls scrunch and snap between his fingers. Trying to get past the bulk of Cora-san's coat. Trying to get past the bulk of Cora-san in general, who's placed himself between Law and the Family like a bulwark.

Cora-san, who's a giant stupid apologizing liar that Doflamingo is going to _kill_ if someone doesn't do something soon.

Law's fingers scrabble harder, catch fabric. Touches something sticky and hot that trickles down his wrist. He slams one fist against Cora-san's back and it's like slamming into a brick wall for how much Cora-san moves; the actual brick wall behind him might have yielded easier. "You dumbass!" Law screams. "You promised! You said we'd get out of here together!" Except it might as well have been screamed into the abyss with Silence on because there is no sound, nothing but the slow shudder of Cora-san's chest, the hiss of the wind through the feathered coat. "You said he wouldn't kill you absolute moron, you _promised."_

A flurry of blows, because if he can't hear Law he can at least feel that. And maybe he does, but it definitely doesn't give the reaction Law's hoping for. Cora-san's voice is a low, ragged exhale. "The kid's gone Doffy," he says, even as Law yells at him to shut up, _Cora you stupidhead, we need a plan, he's going to shoot, please please please stop talking._ "He's free alright? Let him go."

And Law can't hear himself, can't hear anything but the wind and the feathers and the silence from which there comes the _click_ of a safety being drawn back as

Doflamingo

pulls the trigger.

The sound is thunder falling Law screaming Cora-san flinching back in a full body jerk and it isn't fair, this isn't fair, when has anything in Law's life ever been fair. But Cora-san had _promised,_ and they'd been so so close to getting away before Doflamingo'd caught up and Cora-san had hid Law between himself and the crumbling brick of Minion's abandoned town and so Law had thought -- Law had _dared_ to think -- and he hasn't prayed to anything in three years but God oh God if there's any kind of mercy in this world --

There isn't. There isn't ever any. Doflamingo shoots again and again and _again_ and Law can feel the impact break flesh shatter bone send Cora gasping, Flevance for the second time, himself bawling and shrieking incomprehensible things like _not again go away get us away Cora-san can't die CoRA-san PLEASE_ that do absolutely nothing to smother the incoming blow of the next --

_GET US AWAY_

\-- gunshot.

 

*

The world flashes b l u e.

* 

 

And then they are

f

a

l

l

i

n

g

 

*

One long heartbeat stretch spent in vertigo, in that blue-shimmer place. Upside down inside out no way to tell left from right. There's a scream still in Law's throat and feathers still clutched in Law's fists and that _need_ to get away _get Cora away_ echoing in Law's head. A fraction of a moment being squeezed through liminal space, and then only impact.

*

His forehead smacks something hard. His palms skitters on cold tile. He goes down banging knees and elbows that already ache, and for a second all he sees are stars. The second lasts only that though, and Law is scrambling up before his next breath, wheezing and gasping and feeling as if someone has just reached a hand into his chest and yanked out the system of his heart and lungs because "CORA-SAN!" he screams, and registers his voice actually making it to his ears with an extra windfall of terror he didn't  know he had. "CORA-SAN, CORA-SAN!"

_no no no no no_

So much blood and Law's hands are already red with it. When did that happen, he doesn't know. Blood congealing in a pool under the coat and Cora-san's slumped form, blood sliding from Cora-san's mouth. Law tears his way the half meter where Cora-san's head lolls, where of all things he's smiling. Why the fuck is he smiling. This isn't worth it; Law isn't worth it. And he can't be dead, he just can't be. Law needs to -- staunch blood flow. Get bandages. Find a pulse.

Find a pulse.

Law's hands flutter over Cora-san's neck. The pale skin under Cora-san's jaw is bruised and purpling, ugly mottled patterns. Law's hands shake and Law's heart hammers a drumroll in his ears and for what feels like the longest time there isn't anything at all before yes, _there,_ pulse. The relief is immediate. It's also immediately gone. The thrum under Law's finger is nothing but a whisper. And how is Law gonna get the bullets out, how is Law gonna get the blood back _in._  He jerks around for something to help, anything to help, even if there's only snow and snow and more --

There's no snow. Law pauses.

The ground is tile.

The ground cannot possibly be tile.

Except somehow, it is. And the light overhead isn't from Minion island's overcast sky, but instead a steel plated ceiling shining down fluorescence, glass and plastic bottles rattling on shelves against the walls. Everywhere there's monitors and machinery and the distinct tang of antiseptic, sharp beyond the memory sense of blood and snow. An honest to goodness operating table sits in the middle of the room. It's fitted neatly with a white sheet. For half a second Law looks at it all very blankly and thinks, _what the hell._ Is he dreaming. Is he hallucinating. Is he just plain dead. His sight-line completes the rotation of this impossibility to fall upon speckled jeans and a long sweeping coat. And the man standing in front of Law has the blankest expression Law's ever seen. And the man standing in front of Law has Law's father's face.

Underneath Law's blood-slicked fingers, Cora-san's pulse shudders.

Just like that all other thoughts sublimate to nothing.

Once again the world narrows itself into liminal space. Cora-san still dying and Law still useless and where he is doesn't matter, only the klaxon panic of _Cora_ and _Nonono._ Hysteria fractures everything into snapshots. Relevance to the current problem dictates their sequence. And this here is an operating room. And this man has Law's father's face. And Law's father had been a doctor. And this man has got to be a doctor. The grief and hope and incoherence are tangling together in Law's head when he throws himself across the gap and fists his hands into the hem of the man's jeans and screams, past the snot and tears and rasp in his throat, "H _ELP HIM."_

The man's gaze jerks down.

His eyes are gold ringed -- just like Father's, exactly like Fathers, exactly like _Law's,_ down to their cold and hard and almost startled slant. For half a heartbeat Law stares and the man stares back. The moment passes. Unimportant. Law's fingers scrabble bloody furrows down the fabric of the man's pantleg. His words trip and spill to the hammering desperation in his ears.

"P _lease I'm begging you_ you've got help him he's dying he's e _verything_ I can't again not again _please please please --"_

The man's gaze lifts, settles on Cora-san.

Two heartbeats pass.

And then he wrenches past in a movement that sends Law sprawling, explosive even without bearing to mind his previous utter stillness, sweeping coat and clattering footsteps and the _snap_ of fingers in the silence. Law comes up from his wheezing fall just in time to see that spectral blue from before coat the operating theatre. A sharp flick of the man's wrist, a pop displacement of air, and Cora-san's not crumpled on the ground but on the operating table. The man's sword clatters gracelessly to the floor even as his hand curls, midair, around the hilt of a scalpel instead.

Law scrambles next to him, to the steel leg of the operating table. Tries to peer over but it's too high and he can't see. The man has one hand around the vicinity of Cora-san's chest, the scalpel in his other hand glinting light. He doesn't seem to register Law's presence at all.  

That's fine. Everything is fine as long as Cora-san lives. Concentration is important -- the man had better be concentrating. Law keeps very quiet even as he feels like he's about to jitter out of his skin. His throat is hoarse. The tears haven't stopped coming yet. He digs his nails into the meat of his palms hard enough to draw blood.

 _Please_.

Something clicks dully on the tile of the floor, tossed aside. Law looks down on reflex. Bullets, stained red. His next breath hisses out between his teeth.

The man works. Law watches him.

He ditches the scalpel shortly after the bullets. Gets forceps instead, then suturing tools, medical equipment appearing and disappearing from his hands like cards from a magician's show. He whisks an IV pole from across the room with that same strange _pop._ Finds saline. Finds morphine. Finds blood packets for transfusion. The monitors in the room turn on to show heart-rate and oxygen saturation and blood pressure as the man slides needles under Cora-san's skin, and it's been three years since Law's been in a fully kitted theatre but he can still read vitals fine, their uneven jumps and stutters.

The man works.

Sutures. Bandages. The fitting of an oxygen mask over Cora-san's face.

Law doesn't know for how long the man works, only that Cora-san's vitals have stabilized to something vaguely passable when he finally stops and sets his hands on the edge of the operating table. His fingers clutch the metal hard enough for it to creak, red up to his gloved wrists with Cora-san's blood. His back is one curved stoop.

The man exhales, shakily. He stares at Cora-san. Law stares at Cora-san.

And then abruptly he turns, and makes a beeline for the door.

Law catches one brief glimpse of the man's expression before he's gone, white-pallored and lips pressed thin, Law's gold eyes in Law's father's face. He nearly trips on the crumpled pile of Cora-san's coat on his way out. A brief stagger, not quite a fall, and then a pause as he just stares down. He wrenches the door open with one hand. The walls shudder as he slams it back shut.

Law watches him go through the same distant, molasses haze that's been his attention span concerning pretty much everything after the initial landing. Who the man is, where here is, how they conceivably got to wherever here is --that's all unimportant and peripheral. Even though it might be important. He can't really tell at the moment. _Cora-san,_ Law thinks, and only then does the world sharpen briefly. Law bites down on his chattering teeth and forces his shaky limbs to climb onto the operating table, panting with effort by the time he finally collapses on top of the IV lines.

It's hard to think. He feels dizzy and weightless. His head is pounding. He tucks himself into the crook of Cora-san's side and listens for the thunder of Cora-san's heart, ignores the way his vision statics at the edges. It's fine. It's just the adrenaline wearing off, the stupid Amber Lead. In his ears Cora-san's heartbeat is a familiar drum-roll, and Law chases after the reassurance of it, the steady _ba-dump_ , a comfort after all the nights tucked snug in Cora-san's coat against the wind and North Blue's frigid winter.

Law closes his eyes. He clutches at the tassels of Cora-san's dumb hat. To himself he thinks, fervent and fierce, _he's alive he's alive he's alive._

The monitors sound and Cora-san breathes.

Law listens, and doesn't know when he falls asleep.


	2. Rocinante I

* * *

Rocinante wakes up in slowly, in increments. And then all together at once.

Something bright is beyond the film of his eyelids. A hazy, cotton-cloistered feeling's set up shop inside of his skull. Even in the not-quite conscious grey-black, all the edges are wavering, thoughts floating by and dissipating like pale mist.

It's... hard to think. He doesn't _want_ to think. He has to, though. He _has_ to. Because he'd been in the middle something important. The most important --

_Law._

Rocinante's eyes snap open. The light is _hideous._

He thinks he squawks but all that comes out is a wheezing noise, eyes squeezing back shut on reflex. It takes some frantic blinking before the rest of the world sharpens into focus. A blue tiled ceiling. IV lines criss-crossing over his head. White, clinical light. The beeping sound of medical equipment crashes down half a second after, and at its heels the memory of Minion: rattling wind and Rocinante gritting his teeth against the gunshots. Doffy's thunderous face.

_Law._

And this is evidently not Minion island.

Someone must have found him. Not his brother. For numerous reasons, but also: Doffy's med bay is never this scrupulous. The marines? Best case scenario, but it doesn't really matter at this point. Whoever found him would have found Law too. It's the train end of that thought that sends Rocinante moving, sitting up, IV lines straining with the motion, hands coming up to touch the cool plastic taped to his face. He's halfway in ripping off the oxygen mask when something stirs at his side.

He looks down.

A bundle that can only be described as eighty percent battered blanket and twenty percent fluffy, fluffy hat mumbles something blearily incomprehensible under its breath, burrowing closer. Rocinante's hat is clenched tightly between its fingers.

The oxygen mask clatters onto the gurney. The world melts, reorientates. It's like someone just sucker punched the wind out of Rocinante's gut, the relief is so tremendous. "Shit kid," he says, feeling everything spun taunt in him relax three fractions. His hand reaches out, automatically, to smooth down the hat from where it'd gotten skewed sideways, brushing dark bangs aside from the pale thin face. His fingers rest against the crown of the boy's head.

He pauses.

"S _hit, kid."_   And this time it's not in relief at all but as a swear. He knocks the hat aside to put his full hand on Law's forehead, feeling it burn underneath his palm, turns Law's face up carefully but with urgent quickness, noting with alarm the flushed cheeks, the flickering movement behind paper-thin eyelids.

Without thought, Rocinante's hand goes to his pocket. Someone's cut off his shirt in lieu of gauze and bandages and he has no idea where his coat is and doesn't really care, but he if he remembers correctly -- yes, there. The ope-ope fruit is fished out of his jeans, clutched by the green stem, and there's half a bite taken out of it just as there should be.  

Okay. Okay. This is fine.

Rocinante's jaw clenches.

This is really not fine. But it's -- doable.

The fever, in itself, is nothing new. It'd settled in sometime during the fifth month as the kid's immune system degraded and never really went away, lent itself to sleepless nights and endless coughing and the occasional bouts of delirium that had Rocinante worrying ceaselessly. In the end though, it's a symptom, not a cause. Rocinante had -- well, maybe he'd hoped, but he'd not actually thought that eating the Ope-ope would make it go away just like that. The thing's a miracle surgery fruit, not a miracle healing fruit.

Law can use it, though. Get rid of the Amber Lead himself. There is no way he's going to go down to a symptom of a fever. There is no way Rocinante's going to let him go down to a symptom of a fever, especially when the cure is literally at hand.

He takes Law's shoulders and gently, fiercely, shakes.

"Kid. Kid. _Law. C_ ome on, come on, just for a little bit okay? W _ake up_."

The boy mumbles something again, incomprehensible. Rocinante shakes a little harder, and then, with sharp relief, watches one golden eye slit open with bleary slowness.

"Cora... san?" Law murmurs.

"Oh thank God." Tension spills like water from marginlines. Rocinante's shoulders drop, and his grip on Law eases.

Just in time for one small pale fist to smack him straight in the nose.

Rocinante squawks, recoils, and just barely doesn't overbalance onto the floor. " _Kid!"_

"You shithead!" shouts Law, and smacks him again. "You stupid, stupid, _stupid shithead of an aaaargh!_ "

 "Urk," says Rocinante, and clutches at his poor nose.

Law allows him exactly zero respite. Kid's entire expression is scrunched in fury, eyes blazing in his thin, thin face. Chest heaving, tiny fist still clenched and raised like a battering ram. "I cannot fucking believe you. I actually c _annot believe you._ What kind of bullshit were you _thinking,_ you--"

He doesn't get to finish.

Rocinante snatches at that tiny hand, crusted with what looks distressingly like dried blood, in full-body alarm. "Shit. Kid you're not injured right? The bullets didn't --"

 _"Arrrrrgh_!" Screams Law, and smacks him again.

Rocinante wheezes. His clavicle's already tender, mainly, and oh, fuck, was that a creak? "I'm asking a serious question!" 

"No, you're asking a _stupid question._  The blood's not mine. It's yours! All the blood is yours!" One outraged hand thumps against the gurney table. This is when Rocinante realizes the sheet he's been laid out on looks like something from a charnel house.

He blinks at it dumbly.

"Oh. That's good."

The kid makes strangled wheezing noises.

 _"No it's not you dumbass clown._ Blood is supposed to be _inside_ the human body."His hands flex, claw-like. "You can't survive otherwise! You _don't_ survive otherwise. And --" The glare slits, narrows, in what Rocinante recognizes as Law having a Sudden Realization. The voice narrows too, dangerously. "Cora-san, _Where the is your oxygen mask_?"

"Er," says Rocinante, right before the kid collapses.

_Shit._

He barely manages to slump, before Rocinante catches him. One hand supporting the kid's chest, another cradling his head. He weighs absolutely nothing. The ribs, fragile and prominent even through the shirt and blanket, heave under Rocinante's hand.

"Shit," hisses Rocinante.

In the silence of the room, the shallow rasp of the kid's breathing is too loud. His face, under the white-wash of the overhead lights, is yellowed  beneath the flush of exertion. Panic sinks like seastone down Rocincnate's throat even as the kid's eyes flutter, briefly.

He must have worn himself out with the shouting. He shouldn't have been shouting in the first place. And then he attempts to sit back up again, which Rocinante counters in expedience by scooping him up because, _kid, no,_ one arm needed only, the other closing a cool palm over Law's forehead to check his temperature, the fever in it.

Law's lips purse. "No. Save your breath." Rocinante closes his hand over the kid's mouth to emphasize the point and -- gets bitten. Of course. The kid's expression is mutinous. His glare is broken only by how rapidly he's blinking. How absolutely pale his face has gone. The rattle of his small chest underneath Rocinante's hand, the too-quick thrum of his heart.

He's been wasting time.

Law needs a doctor, immediately. 

Which. Fuck. Rocinante grimaces. Because doctors are half the problem, two thirds of the problem, the _entire_ problem. Law's been needing a doctor for actual years and-- The thought spins, shifts, lands.

Rocinante is sitting on a gurney with IV lines taped to the inside of his forearms. There's a doctor here.

And what kind of shitty fucking doctor doesn't treat the sick and feverish thirteen year old boy before the grown man. _What kind of doctor._

By now the enroaching fury is grim and familiar and so very tired. It feels like something is closing up in Rocinante's throat, hot and aching, exhausted and furious, before Law shivers, makes a wet hacking noise, and worry steals his attention away in an override.

Shitty doctors or not, Law does need  _some_ kind of help. Rocinante swings his legs over the edge of the gurney table, before realizing his IV lines need to go. He rips them out and away, the needles and tape, tangling the transparent cords. Then he scoops the kid up again. The kid, hacking wet and sharp, into the bandages at Rocinante's collarbone, hands curled into the fabric of Rocinante's hat.

Rocinante rubs soothing circles into his back. "You're gonna be okay," he says, quietly, quietly. "You hear me? You're gonna be just fine Law."

And he is. He will be. 

Because the doctors don't matter at this point in time. Not them, and not any of the opinions from the rest of the world. Law has the Ope-Ope no mi now. Law can save himself. Law will be free of this: the doctors and the jeers and the shackles of the Amber Lead, very very soon.

And he'll get to grow up, to grow old. He's the brightest kid Rocinante has ever met. He's almost there; his future so close Rocinante can almost touch it, a watercolour superimposed onto the snow.

So Rocinante doesn't really need a doctor. Good riddance, at this point. Law can manage the Amber Lead by himself. All Rocinante needs is a little bit of help. A saline drip, fever medicine; this place has all that. Just half a beri of kindness. And by the Blues, if whoever running this place can't find it in themselves to give the kid that simplest thing, Rocinante will _shake_ it out of them.

Law's eyes flutter closed. The coughing, still incessant. 

Rocinante tucks him close, and then for the first time since waking up takes in the rest of the room.

Medicine bottles and complicated machinery, the floor an absolute mess. Instruments bloodied and scattered. Rocinante's coat crumpled in a bloody corner. And -- is that a sword? The door comes into view half a second later though; the sword is forgotten. Rocinante's feet hit the floor. The gurney table screeches backwards. He doesn't trip and fall by virtue of grabbing the IV stand and clutching, hand white-knuckled. The boy is held right in the crook of his elbow.

It takes five long strides before he's at the door, past all the equipment and bottle-lined shelves. A rectangle of hazed glass set at chest-level streams dim, warm light from beyond. He can make out shapes moving. People. Something orange.

Law's forehead presses, fever hot, against Rocinante’s collarbone. He's slumped and quiet now.

The handle turns, and Rocinante doesn't think twice before pushing it open.


	3. Trafalgar I

 ".... Captain. Captain?"

Bepo's voice wakes Law up from his doze, along with the smell of coffee. It hangs thick the air, distinct and sharply rich, and Law barely slits opens his eyes before sticking out a hand. A mug is inserted. The ceramic handle goes first. Law doesn't bother to check the temperature of the coffee itself before chugging.

The jolt that comes with the heat is a needed one. Liquid warmth piles down his throat and into his joints and insides, to pry them from their frost-edged stiffness. It's a familiar cold. Too many hours spent with _Room_ activated, too little time for his stamina to come back. Except Law hasn't operated on anything within the last two days, so this time the cold’s just the result of the placebo effect. The decade long ache.  A sense-memory of the snow.

Ironic, considering the dream hadn’t even put him on Minion this time.

And usually he’s the screaming, bawling thirteen year old.

“Captain, refill?” asks Bepo, the presence of him a spark alongside several others in Law’s mind’s eye. Law blinks open with a grunt that passes for a _yes._

The coffee pours. Bepo sharpens from a blob of white and orange, and the two auras accompanying him morph into that of Sachi and Straw-hat’s Nico Robin. Law is halfway through pouring his second cup of industrial-strength paint thinner down his throat before he realizes, abruptly, belatedly, that — “this isn’t my operating room.”

Bepo’s normal look of “Captain you shouldn’t drink that fast,” takes on a slightly worried edge. “Uhhh… it’s not?”

This looks, actually, like the hallway right outside of Law’s operating room. Distinctly like it. Just like in the dream distinctly, where he’d fled after the operation and collapsed against the door.

It's also where Law shouldn’t be, considering he must have fallen asleep in the theatre. Unless, between Zou and now, he's suddenly developed a sleepwalking inclination.

Law has zero idea what expression he makes. The  next moment however, Sachi is popping in front of Bepo, hat hovering inches from Law’s face. “Captain?”

He says — other words too. Probably. Law doesn't hear him. His attention is occupied elsewhere.

Dreams or not —- half-nightmare and half-memory renditions of dreams or not — he’s never had _sleepwalking_ issues before. Unless — No. Not sleepwalking exactly. But if he remembers correctly, the first year after Cora-san died —  he’d had something similar to right now. When it wasn’t so much sleepwalking so much as waking up in utter terror, or waking up in utter hope, still two-thirds of himself stuck in the dream, limbs moving, clawing without conscious permission or higher thought. Trying to get through that stupid fucking treasure chest, trying to get to Cora-san, the _no_ rasping through his throat. Then, later, actually waking up to find himself somewhere elsewhere, fingernails torn blunt and raw.

He hasn’t had an episode like that in ages, he thinks blankly. Not after the first year. He hasn’t had a dream like this in an age too, but, unsurprisingly, between Punk Hazard and Doflamingo both they’d become frequent again, thirteen years and coming back. He’d been trying not to sleep, avoiding it. Going on thirty hours then, reading by the light of the operating theatre to pass time. It must have been a mix of all those things.  No respite from his subconscious, but as Doflamingo’s still not fucking dead and in World Government custody of all things, it is not as if Law expected any.

The dream is still superimposed onto his eyelids, technicolour.

“Captain? Captain. _How many fingers,_ ” Sachi is saying urgently.

Law bats his hand aside, rising on stiff legs. His knees feel absurdly shaky. He reaches out to lean on Kikou on reflex, the remainder of the coffee sloshing in its mug, and finds his sword… not there.

The dream, again.

He must have left it in the operating room, whether he had _shambled_ himself out or just plain staggered. His hat too, and Law is suddenly aware of the empty space on his head. In the dream he had — tossed it aside almost in a frenzy, because it’d been obstructing his view of the surgery. The dream. And Law has never had one like that before. He’s been an observer, yes, but never one able to intervene. It's always Minion island looking from the outside in, his imagination filling in the blanks of Cora’s last moments, not thirteen anymore but still screaming with no voice, unable to even wrench ghastly limbs into enough motion to staunch the bullet wounds. And he hadn’t thought he could this time either. And he’d stood there under the invisible pressure with his heart in his mouth and his blood in his ears, until the mirage of his thirteen year old counterpart hurled itself to Law’s feet, screaming, crying, snot and tears tracking down its face, and then Law’s dream conscious had jerked itself to motion as if hit with an electric shock,  the pressure disappearing to non-existence, and he’d shambled Cora-san onto that operating table and dug out those bullets and stitched up all his bleeding edges and saved him, the first time, the _only_ time —

He hadn’t trusted it. He wouldn’t trust it. Law never, ever saves Cora.

So he’d staggered out of that operating room and out of that dream before it could melt into winter and blood or the fire and gunpowder that had been Flevance burning, Lami dying. Left before Doflamingo fucking showed up and sawed off Cora-san’s arm, because that’s a thing that’s happened, before.  

Fucking _Doflamingo._

“... Captain?” Bepo ventures hesitantly.

Law blinks twice and finds himself staring very hard at his coffee. The coffee is shaking. No, Law’s hand is shaking. He frowns at it. A white paw hastily pries the mug away.

“Bepo.” Law’s voice is more like a rasp.

“Captain how many hours of sleep _did you get_?” and that’s Sachi, not quite at a wail, moving forwards again. “Come on, we’ll get you to your room. Not that this isn’t a great place to sleep, but — Actually it’s a terrible place to sleep. But you conked and no one wanted to wake you up after the operation. Until like, now.”

Law’s fingers twitch for the coffee mug. Bepo shoves it under one arm together with the kettle, out of physical reach. The rest of Sachi’s sentence registers.

Operation?

He doesn’t get to dwell on it, because to the side, Nico Robin tilts her head very slightly.

“That would be on my request,” she says. “My apologies, but I wanted to consult you on a reading I was told could only be found in your personal library.”

“Sorry captain,” says Bepo, looking quite downtrodden.

“It’s fine,” says Law.

“And you were finally sleeping again too!"

“I said it's fine.”

He moves for the coffee. Bepo moves it away. That of all things seems to give him reassurance, because he perks up considerably. “Though, I mean, we _were_ going to have to wake you up eventually.” he admits. “To check on the patients!”

Law pauses mid- _shambles_ for the kettle.

_What._

“What.” he says.

And Sachi takes it the entirely wrong way, because the next moment Law is being enthusiastically steamrolled by a status report, field medic style.

“It was very generous of you to save them captain!” Sachi flicks a cheery thumb over to the theatre. “Especially considering their condition and how long you worked. It’s been around five hours since the end of the surgery though, give or take half an hour, so we should _really_ be replacing their IV lines and doing a vitals assessment by now. And you know, cleaning the blood off the gurney table. That’s just unsanitary. Unless...”  

He pauses. “ _What_.” says Law, again, but the word is barely out of his mouth before Sachi continues.

“... Unless we’re using them for spare body parts?” he wonders aloud. “I think we have enough in storage, though. Which reminds me, captain. We’re like thirty leagues below sea level, where’d you find these guys?”

“Maybe they’re fishmen,” offers Bepo.

“Are they _mermaids_?” says Sachi with much glee.

 _“What patients_.” snarls Law, and the silence is immediate and gratifying.

Sachi blinks at him, taken aback. Nico Robin stares at him. Bepo stares at him, expression shifting to worried alarm.

“The… patients?”

“The patients you just… spent an eight hour surgery on,” echoes Sachi slowly.

Law’s voice is flat as an Alabastan desert. “I don’t remember any patients.”

And logically, there can't be any. Certainty not any Law just operated on, because Law has operated on exactly nothing since Zou. The dream is just that: a dream, and beyond it there are no _patients_.

Cold tingles through the collar of Law's coat. Sense-memory.The pounding of the blood in Law's ears and the buzzing in Law's head, clinically familiar. All of a sudden the hallway is too tight, too small. Minion island hidden away in that treasure chest.

There are no patients. There can’t be any.

It's an impossibility.

Law tells this to himself, through the fog, and finds everything has receded to a distance anyway. Bepo's voice filters through like radio static, distorted and anxious.

“I… captain...The man?” he's saying. “And the little boy. I don’t know— you were sleeping in front of the door and I didn’t want to wake you up, but the lights were all on and you — Captain you forgot your _sword_ in there. So I thought it was better not to—  Captain? Captain.”

He registers only parts of what Bepo's saying. He registers them very dimly.

A man. A boy.

_the dream the dream the dream_

It's still impossible. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous and _stupid_ , and Law is sharply, suddenly furious. What kind of desecration is this-- some ill-thought prank, some insidious joke, some enemy devil fruit user? He'll slice open their entrails and feed it to the sea kings. It's either that or Law actually zoning out to an extent previous unknown and unheard of. Operating on actual patients and superimposing those long-dead faces. Operating on actual patients and forgetting the patients altogehter. It’s never happened before. Sleepwalking hasn't happened before either. Doflamingo is barely two weeks jailed and still fucking alive however, so in terms of stress levels he supposes anything is possible. Law has never had an exhaustion hangover so severe in his life

His mind wanders back to the dream despite himself. The blood. The operating table. His younger self.

Cora, whom he never ever saves.

“Captain? Captain.”

Sachi this time, reaching out. Bepo, bracing a worried paw on Law’s shoulder. Law drags a hand down his face, trying to reorient himself. It's impossible. There’s a logical explanation for all this, he’s just too off-balance to reach for it right now.

“Just — Give me a moment.” he says. “I —”

Law has trained his Observation Haki to work under strain, under duress, until he’s halfway to unconsciousness. This is his ship; every single presence on board is accounted for, at least peripherally. His body is thus moving before his mind even registers, pulling Bepo’s paw off his shoulders, sweeping Sachi back.

 _He’s awake_ , the Haki whispers, _he’s awake he's coming he’s here._

Half a second later the door to the operating theatre slams open.

And Law

spins

on his heel

to

face

The ruffled blonde hair and brick-dust eyes of his impossibility.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiny law, half dead from the Amber Lead and ripping a hole in the space time continuum, delirious from fever, landing in an unfamiliar place with a really suspicious stranger: … sAve CORA-SAN 
> 
> Adult Law, thinking he's in a dream, operating on 0 hours of sleep in the past 30 hours, half-dead from his grudge match against Doflamingo where he intentionally pissed on an Emperor, threw the New World into Chaos, and was willing to sacrifice both himself and Dressrosa to see Doflamingo dead: … SaVE CoRA-SAN
> 
> Roci: What The Fuck you two.


	4. Trafalgar II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The amount of sensory description used this chapter: 3x, as to make for for the absolute lack in the last 2 chapters.
> 
> The number of dashes used: too many

* * *

There’s no other plausible explanation for it, Law decides, very abruptly. Clearly, evidently, he's still stuck in the dream.

Or the hallucination. Or... the mental breakdown. Whichever it is, whatever this is. Law had not _thought_ he'd been anywhere near a psychotic snap, especially now, safe again amongst his crew, but the past two months have been very stressful. Doflamingo as a trigger point makes sense. Nothing else does.

There is literally no other plausible explanation.

Because Cora-san’s eyes are on him. Cora-san, one hand braced against the metal frame of the doorway, all giant limbs and ruffled hair and _motion,_ wide-eyed, expression frozen in some rictus of surprised upset. His eyes catch Law’s, very briefly. They’re  dark amber under the crimson glare of the hallway lights. His eyes catch Law’s, and then they flicker past him.

Sweeps left.

Sweeps from Shachi to Nico Robin to Bepo, where it lands, finally, and hesitates, but only for half a heartbeat of a moment.

The next liquid second has him moving. The _shhk_ of his fingertips leaving the metal of the doorframe, the brisk _clack_ of his heel hitting the metal of the hallway floor. The near invisible breath of his passage, rustling Law's hair, as he brushes past Law altogether.

And says, voice raspy and urgent to a very startled Bepo, “I _need_ the doctor on board. Is there a doctor on board?”

“Um?”

“My kid — he’s — here — he’s got a really bad fever and he _needs_ medical attentio _n right now—”_

“Uh mister please calm—”

“He’s burning up too much I just need some medecine I’ll pay you back —”

“Mister please I—uh — Captain?”

A sideways glance  Law neither sees nor registers, up until Cora-san’s attention redirects, spins him around, and the full force of his worried desperation lands onto Law. His vivid eyes. His pale, bloodless face. He looks the same. He looks _exactly_ the same. And his lip is still split. His cheek is still bruised. His throat is still mottled purple where Vergo had fucking smashed it in, the outline of a palm strike drawn in off-yellow and rupture purple where the gauze ends and Law --

\-- is flinching before he can help himself, even as Cora-san says,  “I’m sorry, you're—?” reaching out, Law twitching sharp and near-imperceptible to Shachi’s warning snarl of, “Hey, don’t touch— "

Law isn’t aware Shachi moves. Law isn’t aware _Law_ moves.

He doesn’t blink but the next moment his hand is braced around Shachi’s wrist, and Cora-san’s hand is on Law’s sleeve, and someone, in the distance, is saying, “.... captain?”

Cora-san is saying, “You’re a doctor?”

“... Yes,” says Law, through the haze that’s this dream or hallucination or mental breakdown.

His voice comes out remarkably clear. Actual control of his bodily functions seems nebulous at the current moment, so it is very, very remarkable. “Yes,” he repeats, “I’m a doctor.”

And then he looks down from Cora-san’s face, and registers, for the first time, the ragged little bundle of blankets and dried blood that’s his younger self.

Dirtied winter coat. Skewed hat.  A scatter of white spots on sickly skin. One hand curves upwards to clutch at a loose leaflet of bandages near Cora-san’s collar. Cora-san, who’s holding it very gingerly in the crook of his arm.

“He has a —”

“Fever,” says Law, staring at it. The result of auto immune responses failing in the latter stages of the Amber Lead. He remembers it well, both in himself and Lami, small and shaking in the curtained shade of the hospital bed.

For half a second Cora-san pauses. “That’s— Right. I already said that.” Law’s head lifts. He finds Cora-san’s gaze zoomed, very intently, on his face. “So can you — give him some medicine? Or a saline drip? It’s just temporary. Look, afterwards we’ll be outta your hair as soon as you want. I’ll pay you back of course.”

Cora-san’s eyes are on him. Law wonders kind of blankly if he should mention that neither saline nor fever medicine would help. The fever is a symptom; it won’t go away as long as the metallic buildup is present. But this is a dream. And Cora-san is asking.

“Yes. That can be done.” He hears himself say. Hears himself add, inanely, “We… have the equipment.”

“I swear to -- ”

Cora-san stops. He blinks twice.

“Oh. That’s -- thank you.”

He sounds almost surprised. Startled. To what, Law can’t imagine. The number of things Law can imagine or process clearly at the moment is somewhere in the negatives though, so he doesn’t think too much about it.

Cora-san’s gaze lingers on Law for a moment longer. The grip on Law’s sleeve loosens, falls away.

Then he looks down, abruptly, and takes two hasty backwards. Perfunctory distance, so that he’s no longer hovering close enough for Law to smell the antiseptic in his hair, see the strain of the stitches on his cheek. His heel goes sliding underneath him on the second step, of course. It always does. He nearly bangs his head on the metal door frame of the operating theatre before Law’s hand snaps out, catches his wrist, yanks him straight.

Law is almost surprised when it works. He’s never been big enough to act as a counter weight before.

Cora-san gets both feet under him and one shoulder against the doorframe before he regards Law again, a touch sheepish this time.

“Right. Sorry about that.”

“Your balance is still shit,” says Law, without reflection, almost half reflex, through the haze.

“No it’s —” A beat “ ... Right,” says Cora-san very slowly.

Law isn’t listening to him either by then though, because he’s finally caught a glimpse of the operating theatre.

It looks like something Law would normally never allow, not in a thousand years. What’s supposed to be meticulous is, right here and now, definitely not. Blood trails tacky on the floor, feathers scattered across the room along with emptied syringes, half bloodied scalpels, and finished IV packets. Cora-san’s coat in the corner, next to gloves crusted with enough dried blood that the blue latex underneath isn’t even showing.

“Right—” Cora-san says, “you know what. Nevermind right now. can we just get saline? For the kid?”

Law doesn’t answer. Law barely hears him. Or Bepo. Or Shachi. Both of whom are possibly saying something in the whitenoise of the background. He doesn’t pay attention to it.

The operating room has him narrowed to tunnel-vision.

Blood, and the smell of antiseptic, and Cora-san's shirt a shredded heap on the tiles. The operating table, with the IV lines all tangled up among a dark spread of blood. Details of the operation filter back as if through a sieve, in sutures and scalpel light. The red-stained sight of shattered bone. The dim blue glow of _Room._

A half turn of his head allows him to face Cora-san again.  

Cora-san, whose face is still pallourless. And whose blood Law can smell, underneath the disinfecting agents.  

A muscle in Law’s eye twitches.

The frustration that rolls over him is that kind he remembers, distantly, to have been endemic at thirteen. A sort of flashback in itself, at least concerning this _giant dumbass_.  “Oi.” He says. Hears himself say. Voice low and ominous.

“ _Where is your oxygen mask_?”

Cora-san blinks and —

Law does not wait for an answer. He already knows the _where_ and _what_ of the answer _._ He’s planting one shoulder against Cora-san’s side and shoving before he can think beyond the _why are you like this_ , and that— that’s familiar too, some age old habit returning— expect he’s a hundred pounds heavier and Cora-san’s shaky enough that he actually moves, this time, instead of just standing around like some obliviously annoying wall.

He squawks. Law shoves harder, herding him inside, pushing him back into the theatre. “Why are you _standing_ ,” he hears himself say, between gritted teeth, followed by Cora-san's bewildered, _“um."_ The soles of his shoes hit tile instead of the _chink_ of the hallway metal. White light filters down in lieu of the Polar Tang’s crimson night glare. And it's coming back now, all of it, through the haze and the banking of the shocked incredulity. The details of the surgery, unspooling like film from a reel, crashing over Law and pulling taunt.

The clink of the bullets on the floor. The latex of his surgery gloves wet with blood. Slicing open Cora-san’s chest underneath the blue glow of _Room_ , and finding the damage beneath his scalpel a broken ruin. Remembering: The subclavian artery, shredded. The _pulmonary_ artery, shredded. One lung collapsed from lacerations, from both bullet and shattered bone fragments alike. A rupture in the gastrointestinal tract that spilled fluid, and made Law pull up, autopilot, the fatality rates from peritonitis, from bacteria infection. And he’d been lucky still, Cora-san, or perhaps Law had been, because a bullet had grazed so close to the heart it’d nicked the muscle of the lower left ventricle, but thank God not the aorta, thank God not the vena cava, a miracle perhaps of Law’s imagination, that made it so this Corazon did not bleed out and die on his operating table.

Five hours ago and Law had just barely had him stabilized. If it’d been any other surgeon, they would not have managed even that. He shouldn’t be moving. He definitely shouldn’t be walking. He should be dead to the world with the intravenous antibiotics hooked up and the blood transfusion packets hooked up and the oxygen mask on, and not — standing around protesting like a _stupid._

“What? Wait. Hold a minute. I'm fine it’s my kid that— aaak!” and Law pushes harder, because no he’s not. He's not fine at all. He's a dumbass, that's what he is.

“That's the morphine, you moron,” Law snaps, and gives a final shove to sit Cora-san back onto the operating table.

Metal legs screech backwards with the weight. Cora-san screeches backwards too, as the additional momentum takes both the natural and completely ridiculous course of action to send him windmilling onto the floor. And that’s — that’s familiar too. Just this scene, Cora tripping  over absolutely everything. And Law is reaching out again, thirteen year old instincts coming back on a wave of alarmed exasperation, both hands on Cora-san’s wrist to pull him up straight. A flicker of surprise when he actually manages it — again, at thirteen Law didn’t weigh enough to counterbalance— but then there are more important things to tend to.

“ _S_ _it,”_ he says, and  goes rooting through the IV lines.

He finds them mostly empty, and thus in need of replacement even disregarding how they’d been torn out. A quick _shambles_ gives him new packets which he hooks up to a promptly stripped IV pole. He ties a tourniquet to Cora-san’s arm, already sliding a needle out of its packaging as he does so. He ignores what Cora-san's saying irrelevantly in the distance.

“Look. Doctor. Doctor? I appreciate this, I do, but if you can look here at the kid—”

Law takes his hand and slides the needle in in one practiced motion

“— This kid. Right here. The little boy? — “

Tapes it down and screws on the extension IV  tubing

“—He has a fever? He’s ill. He just needs a saline drip, for rehydration and exhaustion. He— I've already explained this. Are you listening to me?”

Starts a new line immediately after: tourniquet, needle, IV, vein

“You're not listening to me. Okay. look—   _ow_ no _stop.”_

And doesn't get any further than the vein.

The hand squeezing Law's wrist is cool and calloused. Long fingers, broad palm, a fresh IV needle pushed into the back and taped down. It leads up a bandaged arm to a half-bandaged throat to Cora-san’s grey-pallored face, eyes staring out red as emergency lights, lips pressed thin and brows furrowed, thrusting the bundle that is Law's younger self — whom Law had completely forgotten about — up  aggressively with his other hand.

“The _child_.” he emphasizes. “Right here? Should be your first priority.”

He sounds halfway beyond himself with frustration. He sounds exactly as Law feels. The glance Law sends down is wholly perfunctory and completely devoid of his attention. His younger self, yes, whatever, but more importantly: how much blood Cora-san’s still lost, how delicate the stitches holding together his insides are. _How and why the fuck is he still moving._  

How many IV lines still need inserting.

Law registers the important thing. “I'm going to need that arm later.” He tells him. 

The noise Cora-san makes is like a strangled wheeze.

Law moves his free hand to reach for the adapter end of the IV tubing, touches cool plastic. Only makes it that far, before he’s suddenly being reeled in, yanked down, the hand not used to grip Law’s wrist hard enough to bruise clenched in the front of Law’s coat collar.

 _“Listen to me,"_  Cora-san says lowly.

In the background, Shachi and Bepo make alarmed noises.

“I am _this close to punching you in the face right now,_ okay?” Law gives a long, slow, blink. “The kid’s— you’re _still_ not listening to me.”

Of course he’s not.

This close Law can count the minute cross-crossing of the stitches on Cora’s cheek. See the black mix with the arterial red in the ring of his sclera. His pupils have constricted to pinpoints. Constricted pupils can be, in order, a symptom of the narcotics: morphine, codeine, oxycodone. Pupillary reflex against harsh lighting.

Emotional distress, such as anger, or pain.

White-clenched jaw. Wide-blown eyes. The look on his face is familiar as hospitals burning. Familiar as Minion island, that brief-flash moment before he’d smiled, broad and laughing, and looked at Law saying, _it’ll be okay, kid, I’ll be okay,_ pressing their foreheads together, bruises at his throat and the bleeding cut on his cheek. That brief-flash moment Law had not thought anything of when he should have, beyond anything else in the world. Because afterwards he’d put Law in that treasure chest and stood up and let himself be fucking s _hot_.

He still smells of the snow. He’s close enough Law can nearly taste it. The cold and the musk of age-old wood, the devil fruit like battery acid on his tongue.

Gunshots in the dark.

Law registers, kind of distantly, that he’s being shaken by the collar. Bepo and Shachi, equally distantly, are hollering and scrambling forwards. Cora-san is swearing. He registers  _that_. “Fucking Blues, and after I thought you were a decent—”

His eyes catch Law’s.

The pause in both shaking and swearing is abrupt. Sudden hesitation flickers across Cora-san's face.

His grip — one hand on the collar, the other on Law’s wrist — slackens a margin.

And then he stares. Law stares back. After a long, slow beat, Cora-san says, voice slow and careful, expression still flickering with that strange hesitation, “Hey, are you… alright?”

Law blinks, again. Cora-san's brow is furrowed sharply. A reflection of Law's own face stares back at him from red-ringed pupils. An arrangement of mouth, and eyes, and nose. Precise expression: unknown.

His mouth is very dry. Familiar voices taper off in the distance. A close distance.

And then the grip on his collar disappears entirely, which is when Law realizes that’s all keeping him upright. He nearly stumbles, but there’s still a hand on his wrist and half a second later one steadying him on his shoulder. A beat. The strength in his legs return.

“Okay,” says Cora-san. “You okay?”

Law opens his mouth and says: “Your IVs—“

The expression on Cora-san’s face flattens.

“-- need replacement.”  

“Captain, what the fuck,” says Shachi.

Law does not hear him at all or in particular. The IVs are the only tangible thought he can hold on to at the moment.

Cora-san's eyes close, very briefly.

The ridge of his brow doesn’t lose its tension when he re-opens them. His mouth is tugged down at the corners into a frown, blood still flaking at the corner of his lip. “Okay.” He gives a little shake of his head.

“Okay,” he repeats, before once again he looks at Law.

“So you… want to replace my IVs.”

His voice is still banked to that careful, soothing tone, as if Law is some kind of wild animal that needs to be calmed. Which he isn’t. Law doesn’t need to be calmed. He needs Cora to stop moving and get a proper blood transfusion.

“Yes,” Law hears himself say.

“Nice to get that outta the way. Alright… doctor? Doctor. Let me tell you, I’m... perfectly willing to let you do that. _Provided_ you treat the kid first.”  His hand leaves Law’s shoulder, gestures in the direction of his lap. It leaves a void of heat near-immediately. “You see the kid?”

Heat: the indication of active metabolic processes; life.

Law looks though, dutifully. His counterpart is curled up at one dirt and blood splattered knee. Law had forgotten about him. He likely would have even if this were real and the boy not some sort of hallucinatory placebo. As it stands, he just feels vaguely detached.

“Yes.”

“Oh, good.” A very brief pause, before he continues, voice like a metronome and gaze like a spotlight. “Now, this kid is very important to me, alright? And he needs a saline drip. You…. have saline right there. I can see you holding a packet. Can you give it to him?”

Law looks at his hand. He is, indeed, holding a saline packet.

But it's not for —

“I’ll let you do my IVs right after,” adds Cora-san.

In the end the procedure barely takes half a minute. Law strips the boy out of the blanket and his winter coat, finds the vein in one thin, knobbly Amber-Lead ridden arm, and slides the needle in. At thirteen and as a hallucination the boy is papered skin and the gauntness of dying things. He looks surreal. He is surreal. His hat, Cora-san takes, and puts to the side. It’s matted a little with blood at the rim but otherwise untouched.

“Wait.” Shachi says in the distance. “ _Wait._ Wait a minute. Isn’t that —?”

Bepo makes a weird, short, squeaking noise.

“Someone punch me.” Shachi again, even as Law shakes out the adapter end of the saline and screws it in. “Bepo — _ow,_ okay thanks. Annnnd…. Nope. Everything’s still happening.”

“Mmmmrgh,” says Bepo.

The hallucination of Law’s younger self takes thin breaths, head lolling. Cora-san rubs its back while murmuring soothing things. Law _Shambles_ a separate IV pole from across the room. He hangs the saline solution onto a metal hook.

“Thank you,” says Cora-san, when it’s done. He settles the hallucination more comfortably by his side, in a nest of half-ripped cloth and a coat Law dimly remembers having been swiped from one of a myriad of ports when the autumn was still settling thirteen years ago: dark green, heavy wool, too big at the shoulders.

Cora-san considers it, and then sighs. Gives Law a sideways glance, just a touch wry. “Hey, I don’t suppose you have any extra blankets around here?”

Law looks at him.

Cora-san looks back.

A beat.

 _Room_ expands. Blankets appear, somewhere from a storage closet or maybe Unni’s room. Law doesn’t particularly care. Law just needs Cora to lie down and get his antibiotics lines back in.

Cora-san, who blinks, brightens, and says, “Oh! Thanks.” And then, “Hey, can you do that for a thermometer too? And ibuprofen. And — “

The noise that erupts from Law’s throat is something unholy.

 _“No_ ,” it comes out as a bite. The buzz in Law’s head reaches crescendo, patience snapping, and then his hands are on Cora-san’s shoulders with the nails digging in. “Lie _down_ sit _back_ you’re going to reopen all your stitches none of this is going to fucking help _anyways._ It’s not a simple fever it’s the fucking Amber Lead it’s —”

_Me me me_

The glint of humour on Cora-san's face is gone like a tide wash from a beach. He is sharp and pale with fury when he draws himself up to say, “well if you waste of medical licenses had a single shred of empathy and actually _tried to cure it—_ ”

He doesn’t lie down. He doesn’t fucking _budge_.

Of course he fucking doesn’t because he never ever ever does.

To have forgotten that Cora-san was like this: an impossibility.  Except for how Law had, somehow, and Cora-san is always like this. He won’t change and he doesn’t change  and he won’t ever change even after it got him killed, got him _dead,_ and why the fuck had Law expected otherwise. The futile effort of screaming at him to _just stop caring, you stupid dumb clown, SToP,_ coming back flash-moment, thirteen years old and getting dragged from one North Blue hospital to another, Cora-san not listening because Cora-san _never listens_. Like Law banging his own head against a goddamned brick wall. Cora-san on the other side grimly deciding that Law’s going to live, Cora-san deciding that if he tries and hopes and refuses death for Law hard enough the impossibility of it will become reality. And the stupid fucking thing is that it’d worked, he’d done it, he’d died to do it, and he’s going to die here and again to some hallucinatory hallucination because he’s too worried about the _Amber fucking Lead_ —  

“Scan. _Shambles_.”

— to worry about _himself._

The boy floats to Law’s snarl. Every single iota of Amber Lead dissolved in his bloodstream and clogged in his arteries

dumps

itself

at Law’s feet.

Boy’s barely thumping back onto the operating table half a second later before Law’s pushing Cora down by the shoulders, again, snapping, through the rage and frustration and the incoherent buzzing in his own head: “There. It’s done, he’s cured, the buildup is gone, now lie down and _get your IVs in and your oxygen mask on.”_  Cora-san, of course, does none of these things, and instead seizes Law's collar in a way that definitely strains _something._

“What the fuck did you— _what_?”

“ _Lie down_.”

“You said — you did _what_?”

“ _Your IVs_.”

“What do you mean _cured him_? Do you know how many hospitals we went to said there wasn’t a cure?”

“There _isn’t_. It was a toxic metal buildup and I have a devil fruit. Now _lie down._ ”

Cora-san doesn’t.

The IV pole screeches across the tile. He whips around with enough force to snap a line and puts a hand to the boy’s forehead, regards him very closely for one long slow beat, very still and crumpled yet but with the white spots gone from his skin, now. The rest of the symptoms, Law knows, will recede as well;  the fever and the coughing at speed, recovery of the immune system and liver more gradually.

Cora-san brushes long fingers over the fringe of his counterpart’s bangs. Presses a hand over the boy’s ribcage, the boy’s heart.

Lets it rest there, for a beat, before

He

wheels around

again

and it’s

yet another whiplash. To Law, this time. Cora-san’s face like the edge of a new dawn, the sun rising through the grey and the mottled purple and the red-edged stitches on his cheek, mouth opening, a broad flash of white, and Law doesn't realize what’s going on until his knees smack the edge of the operating table from being reeled in and his arms are squeezed limp at his sides from being hugged tight and his vision is gold, all gold, tickling his nose and in his eyes, and he can hear the rumble of Cora-san’s laugh through his chest, half delirious relief and half delirious delight and a third delirious gratitude, saying, “thank you, thank you _thank you.”_

*

He smells of cigarette smoke.

Cigarette smoke and the lingering afterbite of the snow; the nearby scents of the operating room: antiseptic, disinfectant, plastics mixed with the blooming copper of iron in the blood. But above that or beneath that or perhaps intertwined, still smoke, sharp and sticking acrid, and something of the salt of the sea. Cora-san’s golden hair in Law’s eyes and pressing against the bridge of Law’s nose. Cora-san’s arms thrown tight around his neck and squeezing, very fiercely, very tightly, a  sense-memory of heat, safety, and for the long elastic stretch of that moment Law is thirteen years old again hearing the rustle of invisible feathers mingling with the laugh in Cora-san’s chest.

Before he is, just as abruptly, wrenched away.

“Shit, sorry, I'm. I’m just so _glad._ Thankyou _tha_ _nkyou,_ I didn't even get your name, please —”

Heat, and then the absence of. Law neither cares for nor particularly enjoys being touched, but this time the deprivation is a vacuum. He sways.

Cora-san babbling.

“I can’t even _begin_ to express my gratitude. You won’t believe how many stupid-ass hospitals refused the kid, seriously, just — thank you  — “

Cora’s hand still on Law’s shoulder though. Cora-san’s hand leaving Law’s shoulder as he motions in a short arc.

Law, fingers snapping closed around Cora-san's gauze-wrapped wrist before he can blink or _think_.

Heat: an indication of life.

Cora-san’s gaze follows the motion, circles the pliant wrist and the taunt IV line which dangles between them.  “Oh, shit. I should really stop moving around shouldn’t I? Just undid all your hard work.” He gives a little shake of his head, grinning, looking up at Law. Sitting down on the gurney table which makes Law taller, for the first time in memory. The reflection of light in his eyes; the edge of a sunrise smile.

The wrist trapped in Law’s hand, gauze and scar and skin and bone and heat, so very solid.

All of him is, Law thinks abruptly, to the point of suspension of disbelief. The texture of the bandages underneath Law’s hand, the hard yield of the wrist bone. Like a repentance, or an impossibility, or perhaps a respite. What Law wishes to be true more than anything else right now, so real he can deceive himself in the emotion of the moment.

Except Law, thirteen years ago, hadn’t saved his Corazon. Except it is very hard for Law to deceive himself.

Except —

*

“Except you're not real are you?” says very abruptly the strange doctor with the gold eyes, grip still hard enough on Rocinante's wrist to creak.

He gives a little laugh.


	5. Rocinante II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> is wednesday my new unintentional accidental update date? maybe.

Giddiness drains into bewilderment into practiced calm in the span of two heartbeats.

"I'm sorry?" asks Rocinante.

The doctor doesn’t laugh again. Instead a small, sharp smile twists at the corners of his mouth, lifts it up. "This isn't real," he repeats. One inked hand rises, makes an short gesture towards Rocinante. "This — You. It's a dream."

Rocinante considers this.

He thinks: _okay now._

In the background, what he's beginning to recognize as the bear's voice gives a pitchy warble, followed half a second later by the distressed tones of the redhead.

" _Caaaaaptaiiiin_??”

The doctor — captain presumably —  makes no move to acknowledge them.

Rocinante is pretty sure he isn’t hearing them. His sightline is still fixed, in dazed sort of way, on Rocinante’s face, the small sharp smile on his lips. The thing’s too spindly thin to be called nice by any definition or form. A little cruel at the edges. And honestly, fragile in the way of the clinically unhinged. But despite all those things the underlying fondness of it is unmistakable,  directed very firmly in Rocinante’s direction to whatever face or flashback or distant warzone the doctor’s currently in the middle of.

He’d forgotten himself. He’d just been so glad. And, well —

The trauma flashback hypothesis that’d been stewing ever since Rocinante had first manhandled the guy and gotten exactly zero reaction is beginning to ground itself as an actual diagnosis.

The first few minutes banging out of the door and then being pushed back into the theatre he’d been alternatively too frantic and too enraged to register whatever the fresh fuck was going on with the Doctor. Only that he wasn’t treating Law when he said he would, and that he wasn’t treating Law when Law _needed_ treatment. He’d gotten both hands around the guy’s coat collar and started shaking him from the sheer frustration before the expression sitting blank on the his face had registered for the first time, and half the reason it’d registered at all had been because it hadn’t been fear or anger or shock or disgust — any of the normal reactions Rocinante got when starting violence with hospital personnel. It’d just been — blank. Shocky eyes focused in the middle distance between their faces. Almost-drugged looking.

Between PTSD seminars with the marines and Doffy, Rocinante knows when someone’s in flashback mode when he sees it, thanks.

There’d been a long beat of hesitation, half a flicker of worry, Rocinante careful then, and then the Doctor had opened his mouth again and… yeah.

Yeah he’d been _gone_.

And not treating Law, which as always, had been the biggest problem.

So Rocinante, after a brief calculation, had leveraged himself. Whatever the doctor had been seeing, whoever he thought Rocinante was, he'd only been focusing on that one thing. And it'd worked, it’d worked beyond Rocinante’s expectations and wildest dreams, and for that heartbeat of a moment he’d been so delirious with the impossibility of it that —

Well, in retrospect, perhaps the impulse to wrench the doctor into a hug had not been the best idea.

He looks liable to sway on his feet, even more than before.

His grip on Rocinante’s wrist grinds together the bones underneath.

“You’re not real,” he repeats. The doctor’s eyes are unblinking on Rocinante’s face. Whether he says it to himself or Rocinante is difficult to pinpoint. Beneath the still and near accepting calm he’s regressed to, the edge of hysteria lurks.

Whether the hysteria or the calm should be addressed first is also difficult to pinpoint.

 _Okay,_ thinks Rocinante.

_Okay._

He looks left. The bear, and the redhead, and the silent woman with the tilted head stand inside the open door of the operating theatre, just a few meters away. The bear is making increasingly acrobatic faces of distress. Redhead has one hand half-outreached. The woman is standing tall, and calm.

Rocinante looks at them, gaze flickering sideways. “Addffffghsh,” mouths Redhead, catching the glance.  The bear’s face is entirely anxiety.

Rocinante reflects on how Bear and redhead both have been peripherally screaming for the last ten minutes without  garnering so much as a blink from their captain, and thinks, again and to himself, _okay._

It’s probably good he remembers those PTSD seminars.

That the doctor acknowledges he’s in some sort of flashback is half the battle done, at least. And maybe if Rocinante hits that particular pre-made chink hard enough, he can crack the whole illusion.

He says, low and careful, "Why am I not real, Doctor?"

“You’re dead.”

A pause. “Ah.” so it's  _that_ kind of flashback. 

“You’re dead,” he confirms, “so this is a dream.”

He pauses, before continuing disjointedly. 

“You always die. I never — you _always_ die. Not here but. There.”  

The edge of hysteria has leaked back to his voice. “Doctor,” says Rocinante.

“You’re dead.”

“Doctor, do you know where you are?”

“You _died._ ”

“Can you tell me your name?”

“Cora-san.”

“Doctor, I need you to calm —”

“ _Cora-san_.”

Rocinante stops.

And gets no time to process that at all, because the doctor is laughing again, the tight hollow laugh from before, shoulders shaking a little with the motion. His smile is thin and too sharp by far, and his eyes despite the hysteric calm in them are too soft, and he’s saying, through the muffled huff of his laugh, fingers tight so tight around Rocinante’s wrist it’s a chokehold—

“Cora-san, you’re _dead_.”

 

*

The only people who call Rocinante _Cora-san_ are the children of the Donquixote Family.

Gold eyes. A devil fruit that can cure the Amber Lead.

De-age that face ten years; you know it well. Add a pinch of gauntness, papered skin, the white scars. There is no magic in this, no trickery, no devil fruit. Only your own sight and your own memory.

Watch, as it becomes your most precious thing.

 

*

 

This is how the pieces

Slot

Into

p l a c e.

 

*

 

“... Law?” says Rocinante.

The word is out of his mouth before the fuck-all possibility of this situation can connect, even marginally, with his brain. 

“Cora-san,”  the doctor says.

He says nothing else otherwise. It is not quite an answer in the same way Rocinante did not, necessarily, ask a question.

Rocinante stares, blankly. The doctor-stranger-Law stares back.

A beat. 

And then, almost of its own accord, his free hand rises, broad and scarred and IV-taped, to touch this older Law’s face.

Gold eyes do not blink, even as the entirety of older Law stills. Under the curve of the lower eyelids bruises and stress lines are smudged dark. There are no sickly white splotches on his skin, but the bone structure is definitely the same as the thirteen year old at Rocinante’s side, give or take a decade. It’s Law. It is… definitely Law. He is frozen marbled as Rocinante turns his face over in mute, careful examination. The edge of that sharp and very wan smile disappears, to be replaced again with  blankness.

Rocinante can relate. What the shit. 

His voice comes out calm, if distant. "Law, how are old are you?"

This older Law doesn’t answer. Rocinante stares at him very hard until he does. "Twenty seven."

“Ah.”

A pause, to digest.

“Law,  what’s the date?”

Law tilts his head marginally. "The date," he says, slowly. The phrase isn't a question; it's still quite clear Law doesn't know the answer. 

“October 21st, 1524,” answers the woman standing by the door with the dark hair.

1....524?

Rocinante pauses.

That's...

He thinks he says, eventually: "That's… something." 

What the actual _fuck_.

The checklist is automatic. Training kicks in. It is probably very, very good right now that working with Doffy has one accustomed to wiping away any semblance of excess shock in the heat of the moment. Rocinante goes through the top three contenders that could have landed him in this situation in order.  His brother? No. This isn’t Doffy’s style, nevermind him getting and training some mystery devil fruit user in the three weeks since the Minion Call. The marines? No. Although stranger things have probably happened in the Grand line. Himself? No, Rocinante has no history of hallucinations of any kind. The family's clinical insanity, he figures, more or less landed all in his brother.

This is all very very real.

He glances down. Law is curled up and sleeping quiet, face smushed against the outside of Rocinante’s knee. No white patches anymore. The thought is like a jolt of relief. No Amber lead.

_Kid’s going to live._

He glances up. The strange doctor who is somehow Trafalgar Law stares at him, still  drugged-looking and blank as Rocinante resets all of his prior assumptions.

He doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know _what_. Period. 

The guy's not listening to anyone else.

"... You're not hallucinating, Law," Rocinante hazards, finally, slowly.

"You’re dead."

"I’m not sure how we got here, but —  look, you're not hallucinating. I — do you need to sit down?"

He doesn’t move.

“I… feel like you should really sit down. Okay Law? Come here — good. Right.”

This older Law still has his hand gripped around Rocinante’s wrist, and when Rocinante tugs, he follows the motion. The gurney table is not the model of cleanliness but it’s wide at least, and long, and even with Rocinante taking up space and Law sleeping curled up, there’s more than enough slightly blood crusted room to deposit this older Law, who seems still to be in the eminent stages of... Something.

Older Law sits. His jacket drags against the blood on the gurney table.

“Okay. That’s good. Do you want to relax a little and — Law?”

A shoulder hits the side of Rocinante’s ribs. A head the side of Rocinante’s shoulder. And then this older version of Law turns so that Rocinante can feel the narrow angle of his nose pressed against his bicep. He says, in a voice kind of muffled against the bandages, in a tone suspiciously similar to Rocinante’s thirteen year old when he completely forgets himself and his vicious and begins to whine, “ _Cora-saaan._ ”

Rocinante stares at him. 

After a moment, he says: “I don’t — you know what. What did I even expect. I don’t know.”

He waits. Older Law makes no effort to move, or speak, or even glance up. And so, because clearly there’s no help or explanation coming from that front, Rocinante turns to the trio still standing by the edge of the door.

The bear’s eyes, have, if it’s possible, gone even wider. The redhead is making weird clawy motions in place.

“... Hi,” says Rocinante, wearily. He hopes none of them are about to collapse anytime soon. “Can any of you tell me where I am?”

The bear jumps a little. The redhead, looking uncomfortably on the verge of a breakdown himself, bursts out, “Who the _hell_ are you?” in tones of plaintively distress.

“Rocinante.”

“Say what?”

“My name. It’s Rocinante.”

This seems to flummox the redhead for a moment. He flounders. The bear, shifting heavily from foot to foot, picks up for him.

“He…The captain called you Cora-san.”

Almost in reflex, Rocinante glances down again. The older version of Law still hasn’t made any sort of attempt to move. Black hair sticks up against the bandages around Rocinante’s shoulder. There’s the hard press of a cheekbone. Distantly, in the same space that notes Vergo had probably dislocated his shoulder, Rocinante registers that the pressure kind of hurts.

“Yeah. T’s... a nickname.”

“Oh,” says the bear.

He inches forwards, a little.

The woman, previously silent, asks, “Is it short for Corazon?”

“... Yes.” says Rocinante, eying her.

Unlike the other two her face is a blanket of calm, and she’s not dressed in a boiler suit. She makes a very slight considering noise. Continues with, in smooth answer to his prior question: “I believe we’re currently in the New World of the Grandline, Rocinante-san. Four days from the Raidou Archipaleigo." She allows him a moment to digest that. "May I ask what the date is for you?”

Rocinante reflects how of course it’s the Grand Line, it’s always the Grand Line, he’d been nowhere _near t_ he Grand Line, before answering, “... March. 1511.”

Redhead says: “What?” The Bear says, “Addgggsssh.” The woman nods slightly, expression thoughtful.

Rocinante waits. But she doesn’t pose another question. She seems quite content to stand there, observing current events.

_… okay._

“What the actual fuck,” says the redhead, which is a very accurate summary of everything, Rocinante supposes.

Him and the bear both have been inching closer since the beginning of the conversation. The room itself isn't very big, so the end result is that they’re hovering just outside the boundary line of Rocinante’s personal space, now. The bear circles a little, goes to the side where Law the adult the freaky doppelganger is curled up, and then pauses. “Uh.” he says.

“Bepo?” that’s Redhead, frazzled.

“Captain’s. uh. Asleep.”

Redhead stares at him. Rocinante stares at him, and then down over his shoulder, where—

Yeah okay.

The slump Law the adult is in is boneless, and there’s the sound of even, if not necessarily deep breathing. Rocinante’s wrist has not been let go of. He considers extracting it from the deathgrip, and discards the idea.  

“Seriously?” asks Redhead.

“Um. Yeah,” says the bear.

Who, still staring, raises one paw. “I mean. It’s… not a bad thing? He needed the sleep anyway. Two naps in twenty minutes is kind of a record, although I guess…”  Shiny dark eyes trail to Rocinante. The bear pauses. “hi.”

“Hi,” says Rocinante.

“I’m... Bepo.”

“Roci.”

“And that’s, um, Shachi.” Bear gestures towards Redhead, not looking away from Rocinante though. Not until the gaze flickers, briefly to his other side, where Rocinante’s kid is curled up and dead to the world. “And… that’s…?”

“Law."

The bear pauses again. His paws, big and white with pink pads, flutter. “I — oh.” He makes an aborted motion towards the child — aborted, because Rocinante narrows his eyes.

Bear retreats. “Um. Sorry. It’s just that. Um.”

“It’s captain but smaller,” says Redhead, followed by, “Wow. I think I need a drink.”

A beat.

And then, kind of despairingly, “So now what?”

The bear’s swung back to staring at older Law again, and at the prompt from Redhead says, “I.. guess we just... leave him? Captain I mean. He’s asleep.” For some reason he looks to Rocinante then, all anxious, and then half a second later the anxiety transforms to something startled. “Oh. Oh... _shoot_.”

“Bepo what,” says the redhead — Shachi? 

“Is there something wrong?” asks Rocinante.

“I— _yes._ Mister. Roci— your _IVs._ ”

Rocinante has half a second to wonder what is it with these people and their IVs, before the bear is in his face, ears twitching and giant paws patting him down, which — _ow._ Redhead too seems spurred into action. Even as Rocinante blinks and jerks against the insistant— if gentle— prodding, the guy is gone from the immediate field of vision. His voice comes round from a corner of the room a second later, lobbing, “which packets?” and then, “oh hey I found his chart — you think captain did it by habit?” followed by, after the the sound of flipping paper, “ _holy fucking shit._ ”

“Um.. the blood transfusion packets definitely,” says the bear. “The morphine one too, he’s gonna be feeling that soon. Does the chart say his blood-type?”

“No. Just use the universal.”

“I’ll start the line, then. Sachi, pass?”

Something plastic wrapped goes flying through the air. Rocinante finally manages to elbow the bear out of his face when he moves to catch it. A large paw rips away the crinkling plastic top. A very big needle slides out.

“Uh,” says Rocinante. “No. I’m fine? No seriously, it’s fine.”

The bear looks at him with extremely gentle pity.

“Roci-san,  that’s _definitely_ the morphine.”

In the end they hook him up.

Three IVs later and he thinks they’re done before the bear takes one look at his chart and flips out, after which Rocinante finds himself in a whirlwind of white fur and orange jumpsuit and Redhead running blood pressure levels. They get him fully outfitted in an oxygen mask and bits and pieces of wiring that are rigged to the monitors cloistered around the gurney table, flashing light. “Roci-san, how are you _moving,_ ” says the bear, after that's done, in a kind of full-body despair. He is patting Rocinante very gently on the shoulders, as if reassuring himself of Rocinante's continued survival. “You should really lie down. Like, _really_.  I don’t think you want to know what your lungs looked like before Captain fixed them.”

“Cheese,” Shachi advises. “Really bloody cheese.”

Rocinante considers this, considers the not-exactly comfortable metal slab of a gurney table he’s sitting on, and considers also the 2.5 versions of Law currently using him as a neck rest.

He waves a heavily taped hand, pulling off the oxygen mask to answer. “No, it’s fine. I’ll just… “

The bear’s eyes narrow.

Law the adult makes a _mrrrgh_ noise into Rocinante’s shoulder. He shifts, and the lack of any actual support collapses him the entire way so his head falls and hits Rocinante’s thigh. Rocinante jolts a little, expecting him to wake up from the impact.

He doesn’t.

He doesn’t let loose on the wrist either. Rocinante is beginning to lose circulation in the thing.

“... captain?” probes Redhead, after a moment.

Nothing.

The bear looks at Law the elder, then Rocinante, and his narrow-eyed look of determination endemic to all nurses everywhere melts to a kind of exasperated anxiety. “I — ah. Nevermind.” He seems to register the potential problems of Rocinante sleeping on the gurney table at that exact same moment too, because he sends it a dubious look. “I guess it wouldn’t be very nice to lie on anyway. And... we probably shouldn’t move you until captain wakes up. Mini-captain too.” Another long curious glance at Law. “Unless…”

“Unless?” Rocinante echoes warily.

Five minutes later Redhead and Bear have trooped half a fort’s worth of throw pillows and blankets into the operating room, as well as as a giant slab of metal that looks like it came from a marine issue cafetaria table but with the legs chopped off. In this time Rocinante has also learned the woman from before has left, presumably in the whirlwind of medical supervision. “Robin-san went to tell the others we have guests!” The bear— whose name is Bepo, which Rocinante should really start addressing him by,  informs him, piling more blankets, even as Redhead stacks ginormous cushions.

The end result is Rocinante sitting in the middle of a couch made of two slabs of metal — gurney table for a seat, the cafe table for a backrest — and the most random and eclectic mix of bedding ever. Bepo has chosen a green paisley comforter to drape over Rocinante’s lap, which he fluffs enthusiastically. He slides Law the elder’s head up and wedges a pillow between his temple and Rocinante’s knee.

Then he steps back, regards them critically, and  claps his hands together. “There! All good!” He looks very pleased with himself.

“Thanks,” says Rocinante.

Redhead drapes one last blanket over Law the elder’s shoulders before stepping back as well.  Rocinante has a brief moment of reflection imagining what they’re seeing: three people now surrounded by an approximate version of a child’s pillow fort, in a operating room with stray scalpels still strewn across the floor, before Redhead makes a spinny motion with one finger.

“Can you lean back?”

“Probably.”

He does so, after more prompting. Then he leans forwards again. Bear and redhead look at him. He looks back. Conversational topics and action alike have now been exhausted.

Awkward silence presides.

Bear’s extremely pleased expression slides off a little, before he rallies it. Rocinante will give him props for that; the bear’s been trying really hard through this whole thing.  Personally, Rocinante is too tired by now to rally much. Or maybe that’s just the drugs kicking in and the adrenaline kicking out.

“So… do you know how you got here?” asks Bear.

“Nope.”

“Ah.”

“We weren’t anywhere near the Grand Line though,” he adds. The unspoken: _usually it's the Grandline_ is implied.

Either that or a devil fruit. One of the two. Sometimes in conjunction. That Rocinante had been nowhere _near_ the Grandline means if it _is_ Grandline crazy, the cause would have originated from something happening _here._

“... Yeah. I don’t think we did anything that could have… this.” Bear gestures with a paw.

“Right.”

“So... Yeah."

Another pause. The bear makes Rocinante put back his oxygen mask, and now, actually bereft of anything to do, shuffles a little. Redhead taps a finger against the opposite bicep of his crossed arms, looking vaguely awkward.

Seconds pass.

Finally, the bear says, in a tone that implies he doesn’t really want to say the sentence at all: “So… I guess we should leave you guys to sleep now?”

Rocinante just looks at him kind of tiredly.

“Yeah.. I thought.. yeah," Bear shifts on unhappy toes, turning his dejected look to Redhead. "Shachi.... you wanna go help explain to the rest of the crew?”

“I could use the vodka,”  answers Redhead after a moment.

“You'll haveta to steal it from Unni you know. And -- I’ll stay here.”  He turns to Rocinante after in reassurance: “ _Outside_ the door though.”  

And then he smiles, an anxious flash of sharp, glinting teeth. Rocinante nods, expressionless. That there’s a guard is zero surprise. The bear’s smile slips a little, and— okay, yeah, he’s been trying really hard to be nice and accommodating through this whole thing. And considering how no-one appears to have any idea what’s going on...  

Rocinante doesn’t have very much energy right now but he manages enough to dredge up a smile to reciprocate.

Bear perks up considerably.

He gives them one last wave before filtering out, Redhead at his heels, and then the heavy metal of the door, closes, very carefully, until it’s a bare inch from shut.

"If you need anything just holler!” calls the bear, before there’s a thump like he’s settling down on the floor.  

Overhead the light flickers, banks.

A white negative of the operating room imprints itself over Rocinante’s eyes just as everything goes black.

He blinks to get rid of it, a few tight squeezes. When he re-opens his eyes the little light that hazes through is reddish orange like embers in a hearth, streaming in from the clouded glass of the door and the crack between the door and its frame. The contrast from before is jarring. So white, and now everything softened at the edges from the dark. Only shapes and contours and the glint of edges remain. The vivid colours on the blankets and pillows are dulled and blurring in their patterns. 

He waits a few long minutes. When the bear doesn't call again though, Rocinante takes his oxygen mask off.

The air tastes cleaner without it on, despite that it also tastes primarily of disinfectant and old blood. His fingers itch, sharply for a smoke. He ignores it.

Ignores it, and goes instead to brush the hair away from Law’s face, as gently as he can.

The boy is sleeping in the way of the dead or the absolutely exhausted. Unmoving, even through all the noise of the past half-hour, the way he sleeps only when he is very, very ill. There’s none of the shivering or coughing Rocinante had worried about so endlessly for the past few months, however. His breaths are even, and deep.

He’s going to be okay.

The thought trembles the air. _He’s going to be okay._

The relief; a gut punch. Again. There’d been no time to focus and process it really,  apart from that brief sun-spun moment after Law had been cured, what with the entire mess of apparent _time-travel_. It still kind of is a mess. Thirteen years in the future and apparently in the middle of the New World with zero idea who else is company on this ship. But Law is cured. And Law is —

Like a magnet turning poles, his gaze draws to the other, older Law.

Dark hair invisible under the dim lights. Just the silver of a cheek, present against the pillow on Rocinante’s knee. Still falling asleep as if Rocinante is his personal portable mattress. The dumbass kid, all grown up.

He lifts a hand, some reflex of a habit, to brush the fringe from this Law's eyes. The eyelids flicker when he does so, briefly. And almost inexplicably Rocinante remembers: the look on his face, the little laugh. _Cora-san, you died._

This Law has the Ope-ope fruit. Miracle cures, translocation of objects under a set area — so, yes. It’d been Minion island, then, probably. That’d been the plan. Not Rocinante’s best, but it would have gotten Law out, which had been the only thing that mattered, the only thing that matters still. As long as the boy lives Rocinante doesn’t care what it costs himself. He’ll pay the price. That’s that.

The look on his face, though.

A sigh. Fingers tucking the blanket up higher. “I hope you were okay, after,” he says, into the quiet dark.

 _I hope you didn’t do anything stupid,_ lies unspoken, but the thought is there, prevailing. His fingers find the edge of the duvet, folds it down. 

And then, because this where his attention leads inevitable, Rocinante turns back to the younger Law.

He is curled up very tightly with Rocinante's hat still clutched to his chest. His face is calm in sleep, nothing more than the bump of a nose and some black mop of hair underneath a veritable mountain of blankets which Rocinante rearranges. Redhead had chosen a duvet with a sea-side pattern. Whirls and waves and shells. Rocinante pulls it up under Law's chin, the fragile curve of his skull. 

Afterwards he leans back against the stacked mesh of cushions and ignores the urge for a smoke. Light plays slow, strange patterns on the ceiling, shifting shades of dim ambers and clays. He runs a hand through his own hair. Finds in order: a gauze compress against his temple, and blood that flakes and dusts at his fingertips near the edges of the mesh. A migraine, through the fatigue and the drugs, pounds with keen insistence.

No sleep for him tonight then, not that Rocinante had been planning it with himself and Law in this unfamiliar place. He tips his head back to stare at the ceiling. The patterns there shift, something like the echo of waves, something like red sunlight on black water. 

Neither Law stirs, not the boy nor the stranger.

The dark stretches. Rocinante breathes in, settles himself, and waits for the hours to pass.


	6. Chapter 6

Law wakes.

Warmth. Darkness.

The indistinct outline of some looming familiarity in the dim light, that resolves itself to golden hair, and red eyes, and the tilted edge of a familiar smile.

"Hi," says Cora-san.

In the next moment of trying to sit bolt-right up Law finds himself swaddled in what seems to be an approximately stupid amount of blankets. They squash him down again with their combined weight before he can so much as touch vertical. He wheezes. Cora-san's hand flutter to his shoulders, the smile on his face collapsing to immediate worry.

"Hey no. None of that. You're safe now, Law. Safe, okay? It's fine, we're both safe."

Everything wavers in the dark even as Law's eyes readjust. Some red-edged outlines, some pale edged reflections, some metal contours. Cora-san's face, evidently pale even in the poor light. Lip split. A row of stitches that glint white against the redness of his cheek. Bruises at his throat, prominent against the pale skin, outlined in the shape of fingers.

Law's thoughts zigzag, not quite continuous.

Not Minion island.

A medbay, instead.

Blankets in the dark.

And Cora's face. Cora-san's voice. His tone: all careful and worried, looking at Law. Bruises at his throat. Looking at Law anxious over all the wrong things, a fragmented reflection of a different, half-forgotten moment. Because apparently his stupid excessive caring can't be knocked from his stupid dumb head even after he gets himself _shot at_.

Law is not cold. Law is not on that island. The leap from the panicked adrenaline of his wakeup straight down the vertical descent to boiling anger takes a bare second.

_"You —"_

His voice comes out hideous. He doesn’t care.

 _"Fucking_ —"

The worry on Cora-san's face flattens a margin.

"— _SHITHEAAAAAAD."_

And he leans backwards out of the way just before Law can clock him between his stupid eyes.

Law flails. Cora-san's hand reaches upwards from Law's shoulder, as if to scrub at his face, and Law does his best to bite at the fingers in a snap of teeth. He glares, slit-eyed, panting. The presence of near overwhelming anger is like an old habit shunted back. The snow, the cold. Cora-san dying half an inch away when he’d promised, he’d promised with that stupid smile on his stupid face right before he’d let himself be _fucking_ _shot at._ And it had been Flevance again, the second time, hidden and protected behind the rustling behemoth of Cora-san's coat, pounding against a blood-slicked back that just wouldn't _move_ _—_

The absolute terror of that moment.

He does not know exact expression he makes, only that he can feel his mouth serrate into a teeth-gnash snarl. "Oh blues," says Cora-san. "Not this again."

Law does _not give a crap_. The fury and the gunshots are an echo rewinding even as he shouts at a volume that rattles the IV pole. "I _cannot  believe you!_ ” It's almost a scream. “I _absolutely cannot_ _believe you_ you _shithead clown you stupid dumbass what the fuck were you thinking what kind of STUPID bullshit I_ — what do you mean _not this again_? No. Nevermind. Shut up. You have your talking privileges _revoked_ _I cannot believe_ you —"

"I mean," says Cora-san, "I think we already had this conversation."

"— And your absolutely _retarded_ —what."

Law pauses. His hand pauses too, poised midair to strike at any body parts in reach. Cora-san eyes the clenched fist. And then, a tinge warily:

"Yes. This.... exact same conversation. It was when you first woke up. There was— your fever?" And then he's frowning again, the edges of this mouth tugging down, and his hand is gentle and cool as it closes over Law's forehead. "You were delirious. The bear, though. He said the fever should be near gone by now."

Law pauses. "The what?"

"The fever." Cora-san purses his lips. _Not_ what Law’d been remarking upon. His hand on Law’s forehead stays a beat longer. “It should be gone by now. And you should be feeling better." He studies Law very closely. "Are you feeling better?"

Baffled anger shades even further towards bewilderment. "I don't," Law snaps. "You dumb. _Why_ should I be feeling better?"

A beat.

And then Cora-san's face, all pale and bruised and red-cut, _lights up._

The grin that unfurls is the kind Law has actually not seen in an age. Not the too-soft smile he'd given Law on Minion, or the silly grins used as a way to instill some cheer, or the smaller, more reflexive expressions managed during the long three weeks to the ope-ope fruit when Cora-san's mood had been mostly grim and worried. This kind of grin is one Law doesn't think he's seen since the rural islands at North Blue's entrance, actually, back when they were still visiting med-witches in the corralled mountains and wide plains of autumn,  Law being forced to drink about half a ton of herbal tea. All bright. All light. The edge of his mouth is some broad flash of teeth, his eyes shining as if he can laugh with the joy of the moment.

Law flounders in the face of it. His anger dissolves, temporarily forgotten.  "...Cora-san?"

Cora-san’s expression is like a sunrise when he says, “Law. Law you're _cured._ "

Nicotine stained fingers come to grip Law's shoulders. They squeeze, gently, fiercely. Law barely notices.

_Of all the words that could have come out of Cora-san’s mouth._

"... What."

"You're _cured._ "

"Yeah. I thought my ears were malfunctioning. What?"

Cora-san's enthusiasm is dampened exactly not at all. He's prying apart the cocoon of blankets  that has Law entrapped even as he babbles. "The doctor? He has a devil fruit. Er, your devil fruit. Because he's... you. Look I'm not  really sure how we're here in whenever or whatever this place is either, but the point is this guy can use it, and he patched you up. And look —" The blankets loosen their death grip. Cora-san hauls Law upright to a sit, gesturing excitedly at Law's arm. "The lead's gone."

On the basis that ninety percent of what just came out of Cora-san's mouth makes exactly no sense, Law looks to his arm as directed, moved by the knee jerk reaction of _what the hell_ in search of answers.

His arm is his arm. Scrawny. Thin. Shadowed underneath the reddish lights with the wrist bone jutting underneath skin. Law studies it for half a  glance before he’s about to look up again, in absolute bafflement and returning irritation both, because what is Cora _getting at_. Except — the glance catches, again.

Law pauses. The white splotches... aren't there.

The white splotches aren't —

The world blanks, snaps into suspension.

Every other minuscule difference leaps out to him all at once.

It feels like a checklist being ticked down mollases motion in his mind. Quicksilver thoughts in crystal rendering. The congestion in his throat: gone. It’d been present for the past four months but the rasp in his voice is from dryness now, only. The pain in his chest: gone. No hitch or hurt with every breath. Which makes sense only if the arteries have been unclogged, if the his lungs have been cleared of their toxic buildup. His headache: gone.

The white splotches: _gone._

Law stares.

It’s impossible. There's no cure. That is one truth absolute. Except — The fruit. But no. The fruit doesn't work that way. He hadn’t used the fruit. He doesn’t even know what the fruit can do, right now. A different fruit. That was what Cora-san said.

A different fruit that can cure the Amber lead.

The thought strikes at Law in the dark. It sparks. Spins a circle. A different fruit. _Not the ope-ope._

Slowly, Law redirects his gaze.

Above him Cora-san's still smiling, all dumb and encouraging and pulling the red edged stitches at his cheek. Law blinks, slowly. Once, twice. He can feel the conclusions slot into place with each shuttering.  

And then the previously doused tinder of his ire roars back to full heat so sharply and abruptly his ears pound with it.

“Oi," Law says. Hears himself say.

"Yeah?"

"If _any random devil fruit_ can _cure the Amber Lead_ , why the fuck did we have to go all the way and _get_ _this one_?!!"

It comes out as a shout that rattles his throat and bounces against the walls because — because every single faction on the damned _sea_ had been after the ope-ope no mi and Cora had near died for it _died for it_ when what? Another fruit capable of the exact same procedure is right around the corner? What the actual fucking _shit_. The rage is obliviating; Law is going to _shake_ the dumbass above him so hard he barfs up all his decisions so they can be _rewinded_ and taken _back._

Cora-san says, "What?" all confused sounding. Law already has his fist raised to punch his stupid lights out before he continues: "What? No! Law, the devil fruit that cured you _is_ the ope-ope no mi."

" _What?"_

"Didn't I already say? It's you. The doctor is —"

"I know what you already said!" snaps Law. "What you said made _no sense_!"

And then he has to take a moment to pant and regain breath. Cora-san blinks down at him bewildered in the meantime, like he honestly cannot see the error of his logic, and Law’s just about gathered enough air to snap some more before a flash of realization dawns across his face.

Before Law can open his mouth again, he draws his tongue across his teeth.

Says, like he’s preparing himself: "Right. Okay. So I don't really know how or why, but apparently, we're thirteen years in the future."

He stops for half a beat, whereupon Law squeezes out a “ _what,_ ” before continuing in a rush:

"And the Doctor? Is you. The you from thirteen years in the future. Or just this timeline. Dimension? I dunno, kid. I've had some time to think it over and I still have no clue what's going on. But since we're apparently on the Grandline that's nothing new. Anyway, that's why he has your devil fruit. The ope-ope I mean. Got rid of the lead in five seconds flat. Because he's... you."

“ _What,_ " says Law.

“I know. I know,” says Cora-san.

“No you— _what?”_

“It's the Grand Line.” He phrases this like it’s an explanation. It is decidedly not one. “I know kid — I get it. But look. It's the _Grand line_ ”

"... What the _fuck,_ " responds Law.

It's the only appropriate thing to say. He literally cannot think of anything else. For a moment Law just stares. And then the gears of his mind whirr past the increasing number of ????????? question-marks straight down the logic well to actual reason.  “I - what.” He scrambles to his feet. “You — Do _you have a fever_?" he demands.

Cora-san blinks.

It’s the only action he manages before Law is rearing up over the mess of things: pillows and blankets and so many fucking duvets, going up on his tiptoes to touch Cora-san's face. Even stooped over and sitting down he’s too goddamned tall; Law wrenches him down by the ear before he can get in more than a surprised blink. Cora-san squawks. Law holds his head very tightly between his hands. The light’s too dim for an examination but Law tries for one anyways. He checks the pupils; dilated in the red of the sclera but stable. He puts a palm over Cora-san’s forehead. The skin is hot to the touch, but not much different from his usual furnace like temperature.

Clearly though, _something_ is ongoing in that brain to yank him into the realm of delirium. Bacteria infection? Law has never actually seen Cora-san get sick, ever, but between Barrels and Doflamingo and fucking Vergo a bacteria infection is definitely not beyond the imagination. Or maybe —

"Law. Law, no. I'm not sick. Or delirious. Or — Look, listen to me, there are strang—-urk!"

Law twists the head in his hands to the side and scrutinizes it, very closely. He needs a thermometer.

"No _you_ need a thermometer.” A tinge of exasperation has leaked into Cora-san’s voice. “Don't think you're gonna get out of a temperature check until you're totally better kid. And —"

Law twists the head again. He needs better lighting. None of the injuries on Cora-san’s face seem infected. The bullet wounds, then?

"Will you let me finish?" muffles Cora-san crossly, cheeks squished between Law’s palms.

"You're clearly hallucinating," says Law. "So no."

Cora-san's expressions flattens. Law chases it, the screw of his mouth, squinting with the light. Some half-blurred memory fragment floats by, catches him by a hook. Something is... missing, he thinks vaguely.

Something... plastic.

Realization hits in a flash of white lights and half forgotten outlines. " _Where is your oxygen—_ "

A hand reaches out, picks him up by the back of his sweater and deposits him back in Cora-san's lap. The same hand then falls over Law's hat and presses down.

“-- _MASK.”_

"Hey," says Cora-san, really dryly.

Law shoots up again immediately and gets exactly nowhere. His mouth is half scowl half snarl when he cranes his neck sharply for full view of Cora-san’s exasperated face. It’s pale, and grey. Of course he’s hallucinating from _oxygen deprivation._ “You dumb clown _put that fucking mask on_ —”

Cora-san sighs.

_“-- or so help me God.”_

”I’m not sick Law,” he sighs again, which is a evident lie if there ever was one.

And Law is just about done. He’s about to rip Cora-san’s hand right off his hat and smother the shithead with enough oxygen to make him hallucinate on the other end of the spectrum, _why_ is _he always like this,_ before the golden head lowers, drops.

Cora-san’s mouth is pressed thin, and the sigh is gone from his voice when he looks Law in the eye.

"I know this can seem far-fetched. It _is_ farfetched— I know _.”_  His face has gone serious, his voice measured. Lashes sweep pale over narrowed red scerla, and like this for half a second he’s _Corazon_ again and Law is pulled to listen by near-ditched instinct. “But stranger things have happened on the Grand Line, okay Law? I don’t know how it happened, or why. I can’t explain it. I’m sorry for that. I'm waiting for the — future you? The doctor. To wake up. See if he can shed some light on things when in a better state of mind, okay?"

His gaze flickers, left.

Law’s sightline slides to follow. Its hard not to, with Cora-san solemn, his face sharp in concentration. It’s the only time he and Doflamingo look truly alike, some vestige of thunder in both of them.

So Law looks.

And then he forgets all about Cora-san’s stupid dumb face in favour of disbelief, because:  "There's been someone else in here _the whole time?"_

The answer is apparently: yes.

Between the mess of pillows and blankets and Law’s squinting in the softened dark, a distinct lump gains definition. A humanish lump. It’s barely a meter away at Cora-san's knee, colonizing space to Cora-san's left. Dark hair over a fluffy pillow. Something like half a face attached to the hair.  “What the _fuck_ ,” says Law, and shoves himself over the the half meter of distance through incredulity alone, mouth opening to demand some really necessary answers. “What the heck is this? Who the _fuck_ is this? Why...” He squints harder. A hand, knuckles tattooed, poking out of the blankets, is clasped firmly around — “ _Why is it holding your hand?_ "

"... It's a he, Law."

" _I don't care._ "

"Of course you don't."

Of course Cora-san is focusing on all the stupid details. "Who _is_ he?" Law demands, eeling away to for a closer, narrow-eyed stare. "Why’s he here? What's he _doing?"_

Briefly, Cora-san looks to the ceiling. "... Have you been listening to anything I've been saying?" His hand lifts from Law's head, reaches to pat his pockets in search of a cigarette, and then falls to the side again. He sighs. "Okay, fine. In order: He's the doctor who's also somehow you. Aged 'bout a decade. He's here because this is his operating room. And he treated us; he treated you, by the way, so at least try to be polite, you rude brat."

"He treated you and _didn't get you to put on your oxygen mask?"_

"...At this point I think both your preoccupations with my oxygen mask is the greatest indicator you're the same person," Cora-san says in a kind of reflective wonder. Then, in continuance to Law’s original questions: "And he's sleeping. He fell asleep. I think.. I think this was... hard on him."

He says the last bit very carefully.

Law considers this.

And then he makes the executive decision to discard all the parts that is clearly Cora-san feverish or hallucinating from oxygen deprivation or like, really good painkillers. "Okay. Why's he holding your _hand —"_

"I told you he fell asleep like that."

"— and why hasn't he _woken up through me shouting_?"

Cora-san blinks. "Ah."

A weight lifts from Law’s head. Scar-riddled fingers _snap,_  and the pale purple glimmer of _Silence_ flickers to life.

Law looks at it. Law looks back to Cora-san, even as the purple fades to nothing.

_"Seriously?"_

Cora-san frowns. "Hey, he fell asleep! I did for you too, you know. You dislike hospitals machinery noises." An undertone of defensiveness is there through the exasperation. Law feels himself soften a margin.  

"... You're too nice, dumbass clown."

And then continues, merciless: "Okay. Turn it off. Wake him up."

 _"What,_ no."

"What, _yes_. I need to ask him for your charts. And also what drugs you're taking since _clearly, something's_  making you delirious."

"For the last time — "

A noise like a strangled sigh, before Cora-san’s hand goes up to massage his temple. Law is contemplating just kicking the guy awake before he speaks again, his tone lower and slower than before.  "Okay.” Cora-san breathes out. His eyes settle once more. “Just — look. Okay Law? I don't know how to explain this in a way to have you listen, but — Look at him okay? Just look at him."

He shifts his knee, a little. The head on the pillow lolls. Law's brows furrow. "What are you —"

He looks.

The flashback is _instantaneous_.

It's that face.

All the planes of it softened by the dark this time, but that _face._ The memory splinter comes back like a flashlight to the eye. That face: pale-lit by the fluorescent ceiling lights, pale lit by that _blue_. And Law had barely thought of it at all; he'd chalked it as a dream. Something blurred and and too sharp and simultaneously fractured.

The falling.

A white steel room.

Law's eyes gold in Law's father's face. Coming down with his elbows cracking on the tile, some delirium of his own, and the zipline timespan of the surgery, afterwards, more emotion that actual picture, thinking: _he is not allowed to die he is NOT allowed to die._

A dream.

Except— the face.

Law's face. Law's father's face with his mother's bone structure superimposed over the cheeks, the thin nose. Law's face. What it would look like, if he'd ever made it past puberty.

For a long beat, Law just stares. And then, slowly, he turns back to Cora. He has a hand on his chin, expression tiredly wry in the raised angle of his eyebrows. _So unless you have any remaining relatives you want to tell me about._.. it seems to be communicating, even if it's not said aloud, because Cora-san is too nice to say that kind of thing aloud anyways.

Law does not have any remaining relatives. Law's father had been an only child either way.

"What." he manages finally. "Just - what."

"I was told the date's October. Of 1524."

"I— why didn't you _start_ with that?"

"I don't think you would've listened to me either way," he says. Law cranes his neck to look at him incredulously, right before his attention draws back, as if magnetic from morbid curiosity, to the older-doppelganger... _thing_. "And —” Law shoves himself up from his sit. “What are you doing?" asks Cora.

"Waking him up," responds Law crossly.

"What? No."

"What do you mean, no? Doesn't he know what's going on? Did he like— _summon us?_ "

"I don't kn—Law you brat — _no_."

It's too late. Law hops his way across the criss-cross of Cora-san’s legs and ducks the hand that tries to cuff him by the back of his collar. And then, since Cora-san is still refusing to let the _Silence_ dome dissolve because of the doppledagger'sapparent sensitivities, Law kicks the guy in the shoulder with enough force he feels the backlash ring in his ankle bone.

" _Law_ ," says Cora-san, despair audible.

Movement.

What happens next: Law doesn’t exactly see. The face twitches. Motion. A shape blurring in the dark. And then the end of the tableau scene when his eyes refocus; a hand bare inches away from Law's face, joints black with ink. Cora-san's hand, clasped around the wrist.

Law jerks back, reflex, feeling his mouth tug into a snarl; also reflex.

Eyes gleam in the ambient light, a reflection of gold in the pupil. The face from the not-dream.

Law's eyes in Law's father's face. But no, not quite. More like Law's mother's eyes in Law's father's face. Except the colour. They'd been honeyed, for her. These eyes are sharper and golden with a predatory sheen, and they would have been cold if it weren't for the startled surprise in them. Law's eyes. Law's face. The man _—thing? older counterpart? anomaly?_ — is sitting up, hands occupied; one hand still wrapped around Cora's wrist, his other hand halted, mid-air, with Cora-san's fingers clenched on _his_ wrist.

He's looking down at Law. Staring. Law stares back.

His brows furrow.

"Hey." Cora-san, in the same low soft tone he'd used to greet Law when he first woke up, and the man's attention jerks so sharply following it nearly causes Law whiplash.

His head lifts. A blink, then, two. Eyes on Cora-san's face. The brow smooths into utter blank stillness.

"Law," says Cora-san, and for half a second Law thinks Cora-san means him, but no. The voice he's using is strange. Calm and slow.  "I'm sorry the kid woke you up. He didn't mean any harm." A pause. "Can I let go of your hand now?"

The man stares.

After a long moment where no one talks and nothing moves and the only noise is the heart monitor, he finally croaks. "... What."

For reasons unknown Cora-san decides this passes evaluation, because his grip on the man's wrist recedes. The arm drops then, limp, to the man's side.

"Are you feeling better?" he asks, tone still that stilted left from normal.

"Cora-san," says the man.

"Yes. Hi."

"Cora... san?" His face is blanked to the point of unreadability. Past the base flatness of his voice though, a thread of bewilderment lurks. He stares. "... Cora-san?"

He says it as if placing different areas of emphasis on Cora-san's name will magically allow it to make sense. Law doesn't really know what he was expecting in the first place. It probably wasn't this.

What does he remember of this guy anyway. Not much. The frozen blankness of his expression, underneath the bright lights. Some measure of surgical competency, splintered and fractured. The blue. Blood on latex gloves.  

"Law," says Cora-san.

The man says nothing. Cora-san says nothing, although his expression twitches a little after five long seconds. Law looks between them, unsure of what to do, and then sure of one thing and that's that this conversation is getting exactly nowhere.

"Oi," he interrupts finally, into the silence. "Why're we here?"

"Law," sighs Cora-san.

"If we're apparently thirteen years in the future we deserve answers, clown." He hooks himself up using Cora-san's arm as a crutch and moves into the man's space. The man, who pulls his attention away from staring at Cora-san with what seems like an arctic amount of effort. "You." Law narrows his eyes. "What did you _do_?"

No answer. Just a lot more staring.

Cora-san picks up after him though. Because a second and half a sigh later he says, in that very specific voice: "Law. I talked to— Bepo-san. He told me he couldn't remember anything unusual lately that could have caused this. What about you? I understand we're in the New World right now, which is why I'm asking."

The Grand Line again. Law doesn't get why it’s relevant. And who the hell is Bepo?

"... No," says the man, after a moment.

When Cora-san looks at him encouragingly he adds: "There's — Nothing. That could have caused this." His voice has lost the rasping quality. Gone quick, and level, and still flat. Law considers this, crossing his arms.

Cora-san evidently does too, because when the silence is broken again it’s with a frown.

"So, it... wasn't here. I still think —” he pauses. “I told this to the others, but we weren't near the Grand line at all. And I blacked out before whatever happened, so I have no idea. Law?"

"Me?"

"Yeah. Unless, shit— were you out too?" Worry bleeds back into his voice. It's not one for this whole time travel bullshit. Law scowls and thumps a heel onto his knee before he can try patting him down again.

The man says: "He was awake when he landed."

And so Law was.

In truth, if he scrounges for it, Law can remember those few moments better than anything else afterwards. Everything then had been crystal rendered in the hysteria and the shock and the fear. Minion island in the snow hidden under the blanket of Cora-san's coat, hearing the thunder of the trigger being pulled, the need to _GetAway_ a scream in his own head before the world fractured b l u e.

"... Law?" asks Cora-san.

They’re not meant to be aired though; those moments. They’re not meant to be spoken. Especially in front of some stranger. Just thinking about it — no. But. His eyes narrow. He bites his lip. Glances, out of the corner of his eye, Cora-san.

"We were... not here." he says, very slowly.

"We needed to get — anywhere else. And there was this — blue. And after that we were somewhere else for a moment. I don't' know how to describe it. All of it was blue. And then we were here."

As for as explanations go Law is aware this is not among his best.

Cora-san’s mouth opens. 

“Blu _e,”_ says the man, in what is his flattest tone yet.

Cora-san's head turns. Law’s does too.

The man snaps his fingers.

Something shimmers in the dark. A sphere, translucent and shedding pale light and —

"Yeah," says Law, staring. "That."

The colour of it is unlike that of _Silence,_  which is a rich cobalt that seems, unless one is looking extraordinarily hard even in the pitch black, to exclude no visible light of its own. This thing is blue and near icy and very much bright, and it’s familiar too. That colour, not just from that in-between place, Law remembers now, but during the surgery. Hadn't the man snapped his fingers and —

The ope ope no mi is a miracle surgery fruit, Law thinks dumbly.

On the train of that thought comes another one: the ope-ope is a miracle _surgery_ fruit.

"Should he be able to —" says Cora-san, plucking the _unless there's some miracle time travel mechanism no one's telling me about this situation still doesn't make any sense_ out of Law's head.

" _No,_ " says the man.

He pauses. Cora-san pauses too. They turn as one to stare at Law, before Cora-san edges, sounding dubious: "The ope-ope's.... known for... space manipulation."

"I know," says the man.

"You... ever tried the other one?"

"..."

"Yeah. I didn't think so." A hand rises. Cora-san rubs at his forehead. "Law," he says slowly, "Did you just teleport yourself and me across the time space continuum with the devil fruit you've had for _30 minutes._ "

Silence.

"... You were the one who made me eat it," Law says.

Silence, again. Mainly the disbelieving kind. From all three of them.

Cora-san stares at Law. The man stares at Cora-san. Law stares at nothing in particular and tries furiously to parse out events in his head. Had that blue space been — the inside of the time-space fabric? _What even._

After a bit, Cora-san tips his head back with a strangled noise, as if he's just throwing his hands up concerning the entire situation in general. He fumbles around his pockets again.

"I — ah shit. I really need to remember I don't have my smokes right now." He sighs. His other hand raises in what Law recognizes as a nervous tick, hand going to run through his hair. The arm raises halfway. And then he pauses. "Also. Um. Can you?"

The man looks at Cora-san's half-raised arm and Cora-san's attached wrist and his own hand, knuckles pale and clenched very tightly around the bone of it. After a beat where his face is extremely blank still, he releases the hold.

One knuckle at a time.

Despite the fact his expression is still _completely_ unreadable, the action manages to look like it’s taking some grim and tremendous force of effort.

"Thanks," says Cora-san, shaking the wrist out afterwards. He gives the man a small smile.

The man stares. He shifts, a little.

He continues to stare at Cora-san, thereafter, face wan under the lights. Not as grey as Cora of course, who is tired and bloodless in his pallour, but still pale.

His eyes gleam. His lips are pressed into a line. Something about it tickles at the edges of Law’s memory, but he doesn’t remember what exactly before Cora-san rotates his wrist until the bones _click_ and abruptly, the man stands.

He says, voice flat as anything, “I… need to." A pause. "Go."

Cora-san blinks. "You do?” he wonders. “Oh, yes. Of course. It's just-- no nevermind. Sorry, We didn't mean to keep you." The man's making a beeline for the door at a clipped walk even as the sentence finishes, though, and just like that familiarity sharpens into memory.

Law watches the images superimpose. Right. It'd been after the surgery. The man had stared at Cora-san then too, before turning to leave. Shoulders rigid as he went. Half a stagger with his heels clicking sharp against the tile.

That time: the room so bright it peeled at the eyes. This time, nothing but the amber tint of old light, creeping long fingers to touch wavering edges. The metal door creaks as it scrapes open all the same. Light flooding in.

And then a voice, deep and startled but cheerful sounding, bouncing off the walls of the corridor.

"Captain!!!" it exclaims.

The footsteps stop, but only for a heartbeat.

The voice continues. "Captain, you're awake! Are you feeling better? I just went and got the extra blood packets for Roci-san from storage. Don't worry, we still have lots. Do you want to — Captain? Uh... Captain?... captain?"

It trails off. The man's clacking footsteps retreat at speed into the distance. After a wavering moment, a head pokes through the door.

A giant, fluffy head. With teeth.

A giant fluffy head with teeth that’s wearing orange. And carrying a box. It looks, if it is possible for a polar bear in a jumpsuit to have human expressions, anxious and a little confused.

Then it opens its mouth and the same voice from the hallway says, "Uh... Roci-san? I was. Gone for... twenty minutes?"

Law grips Cora-san's knee very hard and says, _"what._ "

"Bepo-san," says Cora. To Law he says, "Bepo-san is a polar bear mink, I believe," as if that is any kind of explanation at all. He turns back to the bear. "Bepo-san, Law."

Law can see the split second lift-up of the bear's expression and it’s surreal. He didn’t know bears could have _expressions_. But this one does, evidently. Its ears perk. Its mouth opens. It says, excitedly, "Ohhhh! Mini Captain's awake?" and then advances in a rush into the room, skirting the edges of fallen instruments.

When it reaches the gurney table the first thing it does is peer very closely at Law, eyes shining with a distinctly sparkly sheen. "Mini Captain!" It says, and then with a sort of teary wonder. "You're... you're so _small!_ "

An eye twitches. And then, because the bear is actually too close and its teeth are hideously sharp, Law inches away until he's more or less hidden in the familiar mountain of Cora-san's bulk and all the blankets.

He scowls. The bear's eyes _sparkle._

Cora-san makes a very slight huffing noise of amusement and Law slams his heel down, very sharply, onto Cora-san's shin.

Between the drugs and Cora-san's stupid absurd pain tolerance Law almost doesn't think he notices it, the jackass, but a second later his hand comes down to rest on Law's head. The weight of it is cool and familiar, and also the equivalent of a dry look. And then, because sometimes he does actually listen to what Law is saying, he sighs. Gestures to the bear, a trace of palpable amusement still in his voice when he asks, "Bepo-san, the transfusions?"

The bear jerks straight.

"Oh yes! Of course!"

The box he’s carrying drops down onto the gurney with a thud. Giant white paws pry it open, and then from within the bear delicately lifts out neatly labelled blood packets. Law stares. The bear seems to know what he's doing though. He chatters all the while as he unhooks and switches out the IV lines, mainly about Cora-san's vitals, sneaking really un-subtle sparkly looks at Law all the way.

It’s a good ten minutes of solid and medically relevant chatter later before the bear’s ears perk again in that previous distinct way. Like he’s remembered something important, or exciting. Law’s eyes narrow. He’s proven correct when a to-be-discarded morphine packet is waved  around animately even as the bear says, "And oh yes! We have a room prepared for you now! We converted one of the spare bunkrooms and all the medical monitoring equipment has been fitted in. It’s super — I hope it’s not too cramped, but I think it should be okay. And we were only waiting for Captain to wake up to move you guys anyways, so..."

The excitement pauses. The bear trails off.

For a brief moment the sparkly chatty look is replaced by an edge of worry.

"Yes?" says Cora-san.

The bear’s hesitation only lasts a beat. Giant paws fiddle with a translucent plastic line, before he gathers himself, and asks, suspiciously casual. "Uh. If you don't mind me asking. What... exactly happened? With Captain?”

Cora-san blinks.

He seems surprised by the question, which is dumb, but says with care anyways: "He... woke up? I think he was feeling better. Then before. We, uh, got the time-travel situation cleared up. And he sounded level. I assumed he'd other responsibilities to tend to?"

The bear... pauses.

Personally, Law thinks the guy didn't leave so much as he'd just fled. The bear's uncertain look only adds to the hypothesis.

"Right," the bear says, slowly. "Yes. That's…. Yes."

When Cora-san eyes him with the beginnings of a frown though the expression is wiped. "I'm sure that's it!"  He says with hurried cheer. And then, in a blatant change of subject, goes on describe all the different monitors fitted around this custom Do-It-Yourself ICU room. Apparently it’d been a trial to cram everything in, but someone named Penguin is really good with a wrench and wiring. That topic soon becomes exausted however, whereupon the bear switches tracks and summarizes some minute details that need to be done before they can be installed in said room. A quick bath, invalid style. Clean clothes, sizes guesstimated. And, the sparkle returning very prominently to the bear’s eyes: “Food!  Uh, you’re gonna be on fluids for the time being Roci-san, but I got the chef to prepare something nice for mini-captain."

"Oh," says Cora-san. "That's --very kind of you. Thankyou."

"Only the best for guests!"

"Right. Okay, so you know he can't —"

"No gluten," assures the bear. "Broth and riceballs instead!"

When they make to leave Cora-san lifts Law to his shoulder and uses the IV pole as a crutch, the bear hovering very close and very anxiously as if worried Cora-san'll topple right over. He doesn't though, barely tests his weight at all before getting to his feet, and Law swoops to snatch the oxygen mask before it can clatter. The thing is still not on Cora-san's face. They're not about to haul the entire machine out with them however, so after a moment, Law lets it drop. There had better be another one in the new bunkroom. And Cora-san had better actually wear it as soon as they get there.

The bear leads them through the reddish, metal labyrinth of the corridors.

It looks like Doflamingo's ship, a passing resemblance, but everything is metal and bolts, not the heavy concrete of the Family's renovated warships. Reddish light falls, tints everything a crimson garnish. It's curious and Law wants to know why, but he also does not particularly want to ask, pressed tight to Cora-san's shoulder and looking around with suspicion. The bear chatters all the way though, pointing to doors and lights and the corridors they don't go down, an active stream of commentary, and somehow even though his voice is nearly as deep as Cora-san's he still manages to chirp. Halfway down he herds them into a bathroom, where there are basins of soap water and something that smells distinctly chemical, and after a towel off behind curtain dividers he throws new jeans and a long loose shirt at Cora-san and a hoodie and what looks like recently hemmed pants at Law, and then herds them back out and into a cabin room with a yellow bulb, made small and crowded by machinery.

"So. This is you!"

The bear busies himself with checking the monitors as Cora-san sits down on the bed, Law easing himself gingerly from Cora's shoulder to his lap. Under the new light his face looks dangerously grey beneath a fall of damp gold hair, and the stress lines under his eyes alarmingly dark.

Law holds up the new oxygen mask. He purses his lips fiercely when he gets waved off. "No,” he says, stubborn. “Put it on."

Cora-san eyes him. Law eyes him right back.

He sighs, and puts it on.

The bear pats the monitor on its bulky plastic top, checks them both over once more, and then leaves. Three minutes later he's back, balancing a plastic tray with gently steaming bowls and one very tall pitcher of juice, which he partitions out with instructions. "The rice balls and the broth is for mini-captain," he explains, handing said broth to Law. It is lightly seasoned, and extremely colourful. "And the clear soup's for Roci-san, since he shouldn't be eating anything with actual substance for a bit. And the juice is to share."

He waits, expectant. Cora-san thanks him, muffled through the oxygen mask, and then very pointedly nudges Law, inspecting the soup with slightly narrowed eyes, with one knee.

Law looks up. His lips purse.

Cora-san's looking down at him all encouraging and a touch reproving though, so in his first direct addressal of the bear, he manages a flat and only partially antagonistic: “Okay. Now get out."

Cora-san sighs.

The bear beams. "No problem mini captain!" and salutes, which as reactions go is infinitely disturbing.

When he leaves again, it's at a swan. And with assurances that someone will be _right_ outside if they need anything, so just holler, or press the call bell, either way! Law watches his bulk fit through the door, squeeze, and vanish. The door itself closes gently, metal frame brushing metal floors.

Law waits. The bear doesn't come back.

A monitor shows the time in blocky green letters at its lower right corner. _4:03_ am. Law watches the minutes crawl by. The bear doesn't come back.

The bear doesn’t come back. And coil by coil, the tension in Law’s chest finally unwinds.

Just himself and Cora-san and this room, a little dim with the singular light bulb circling down. Broth cooling in Law’s hands, colourful with vegetables and rice and what smells like saury and — wait. This is his favourite actually. _What the hell._ For a little while he stares at it. And then he tips his head back until it taps against Cora-san's chest. The diaphragm behind him rises, falls.

Law squints at the metal ceiling of the cabin and considers how the entire past two hours or so have felt extraordinary like a fever dream.

Like seriously. _What._

Timetravel. His older self. Being in — 1524? Thirteen years in the future. Because the ope-ope no mi can apparently _break time-space_. This whole thing with talking polar bears, which Cora-san does not at all seem surprised by. For a while, Law thinks circles around it all quite blankly, before the mountain he's using as a backrest shifts.

Cora-san’s oxygen mask goes to his throat instead of his face again, but since he’s gulping down soup Law lets the offense go with only a narrow-eyed look. A spoon clinks against ceramic.

"Eat your broth, kid," says Cora-san.

Thirteen years in the future here. Who can think of eating? "Not hungry,” says Law with a frown.

"You haven't eaten anything in two days, so yes you are. Come on, down the chute it goes."

He mimes the motion. Law’s frown turns into a scowl. "Still not hungry."

"Brat."

“I’m _not._ ”

“You need to eat anyways. Come on Law.”

"... What if it's poisoned?"

Cora-san gives him him a dry look; it was a long shot anyways. "If these guys wanted to do anything, they've had plenty of opportunity. _Especially_ with the IV lines."

Law scowls mutinously. Cora-san sighs, and then he too switches tactics.

“What,” says Law, as Cora-san’s soup bowl is set back onto the bedside tray, next to the untouched juice pitcher and the rice balls. "Wait no what."

Law stares at it. Cora-san leans back, arms crossing. The message is clear:

_if you're not going to eat I'm not either._

"You fuck," says Law.

A flash of teeth, something of a grin. "Your decision, brat."

The urge to punch him in is strong, except how it wouldn't do a single thing. "Eat your own soup you dumb clown,"  he says finally, with grudging force, and picks up his spoon.

He's barely into the first bite before the hunger registers. His appetite's been nonexistent the past months — the past year — so it’s a jolt. And then Law’s scarfing down the broth before he can stop himself, but he knows enough about his own stomach to slow down after the first few bites. He finishes the broth though. Reaches for the rice balls. The grain is still warm and sticky. Seaweed crisp. Inside; something like fish or seaking, grilled and salted lightly.

Law finishes two riceballs. He finishes them slowly. Cora-san pours him juice inbetween, and his own bowl is emptied and placed back on the tray, although he nearly knocks the juice pitcher over doing so. Law looks up at the noise. Cora-san smiles down at him, reflexive, even as he rights the pitcher. The motion pulls at the stitches of his cheek, the stress lines under his eyes.

His face is very, very tired.

Slowly, Law lowers his third rice ball.

He opens his mouth. He closes it, lips pressed thin. He doesn't know what to say. 

When Cora-san settles himself behind Law again it is in ginger motions. Long legs cross, one knee braces against the wall. A scarred hand runs carefully through gold hair still damp from the towel off. He’s a mountain of bandages through the loose cut of his shift, skin mottled from bruising in the places where the white doesn't cover.

He looks — fragile. The thought of it is strange, and unfamiliar.

He’s always been mountainous, in a way. The height, and possibly the way he stress-smoked like a chimney. First as simply _Corazon,_ Doflamingo’s mute jackass of a brother, whom for all his clumsiness been an Executive for a reason. And then afterwards just Cora-san, a presence impossibly big and always warm and stable as bedrock. He'd never been fragile. Law had never thought of him as fragile. But on that island —

The blood, and the cold, and the snap of bones. Doflamingo behind the trigger.

And he’d been fragile. He’d been _dying._ And Law had been terrified beyond comprehension or belief or anything at all, because his own death was one thing but Cora-san's something else entirely. It'd been something impossible. It’d been something _all too possible_. And it’d been Flevance again, the second time, all the world wrenched away to send Law falling. Cora-san had promised. Cora-san had lied. Cora-san had _almost  died._ And the unadulterated fury Law had felt when he’d woken up to find them both safe had been three years of defense mechanisms coming right back, funnelling fear and terror and panic into something tangential, half a million obscenities to be shouted to cover for the boy terrified underneath it. Anger and bitter, caustic hate, because that is what Law knows and has known ever since Flevance died to lies and gunfire. Nurtured under Doflamingo, he does not think he knows how to untangle the habit if he'd wanted to.

The words are still at the back of his mind, clinging. But the anger has gone dim and distant. And neither those things— shouting or anger — feels right, here and now, anyways.

Not in this little room. With its yellow bulb. With Cora-san's tired, tired face above him, still edging out a smile for Law. He is white bandages and barely-clotted wounds and bruises on his throat, stress lines under his eyes, exhausted and brittle-looking at his edges, and it makes something twinge, in Law. Something, quiet, and still terrified. It is crawling out of his skin now, those feelings, within the distractions of the past hours. Thirteen apparent years in the future and everything a mess, but if Law is being truthful he does not care for the absurdity of the situation. Only that Cora-san is alive, and that he is here by Law's side. If this is his one and only miracle than so be it.

He does not want to shout anymore. He had always expected to be the one to break Cora-san's heart, never the other way around.

Law picks at his riceball. He does not know what to say. He wants to say something, though. Something genuine. He’s bad at that.

In his secret heart he can admit he’s afraid of it: being truthful, being sincere. Especially now when he is small, and exhausted, and if he stops ignoring it still beyond terrified. All he really wants to do is fall back on old habits or just go to sleep. But it feels important, looking up at Cora-san’s pale, tired face, to say something that’s not the customary insults and half-jibes. Because Law had nearly lost him. He’d nearly lost him.

There isn’t anything really, more terrifying than that.

If he’d died, then.

_If he'd died._

Law leans backwards, into the warmth. Cora-san smells like chemicals and metal instead of tobacco smoke. Another reminder. Another missing familiarity Law had barely known was a comfort, even if it's killing Cora-san's lungs.

He leans back and remembers: Cora-san's eyes, there in the snow.

They’d been so soft. He’d pressed their foreheads together, his smile wide and yet so quiet. Saying those words , which had been so stupidly, sappily, undeniably _Cora._  And maybe Law does know what to say. And it’s important, isn’t it, for him to say it. Because it would have been another hurt, a wretchedly terrible gouge of a hurt, if Cora-san had died there and then without hearing those words given back to him. If he dies, period, without hearing those words. If somehow he dies without knowing this for certain, as if it is of any doubt. Because it's — well, it's the bare and irrefutable truth.

Law puts his rice-ball away. He feels his lips screw together, sideways. Uncertaintly at first, and then more resolutely, he tugs on Cora-san’s shirt.

And still doesn't look at him, not at all, when he opens his mouth to let the words trip themselves out.

"I. Cora-san. I— _aishiteruze."_

_Aishiteruze. I love you._

It's dumb. It's so dumb. And Law wants to hit something immediately after the last syllable leaves his mouth. A flush rises on his cheeks. He's scowling already from the embarrassment, trying to look anywhere but Cora, finding everything so quiet he can hear a pin drop, when faintly, slowly, Cora-san's voice says.

"Law. Law... say that again?"

"What?” Law whips around. Cora-san's mouth is open, his eyes saucer-wise. ”I — _No._ "

"No. Law. Law. Say it again? Please?"

A beam, slow but undeniable, is spreading to replace the absolute astonishment on his face.

The embarrassment is real. Law can feel his own cheeks burn. "No! Shut up! It was just a — get that dumb look off your face!"

He does not. And then the astonishment is all gone, every iota of it, and what's left is the breadth of Cora-san's grin, all bright and astounded, Cora-san laughing, an amazed, breathless laugh. He lifts Law up and spins him around, even as Law squawks and splutters. "I — _Law_ ," he says, voice all delight, his eyes so bright it seems the reflection of the sole bulb is gathering in the red of the pupil.

Except no. Not just the reflection. Something wet, set to overflow. The gold of his hair falling into the red of his eyes, the wavering mirage of water there. "Are you crying?" demands Law, horrified, feeling himself go redder, flailing his arms. "I--you— It's just words you dumb clown, don't _cry_." But Cora-san doesn't answer. He's just laughing, and then squishing Law very close to his chest, tight enough there's barely any wiggle room and Law is wheezing against his collar.

He says, into the crown of Law's head, “Aishiteruze Law, _aishiteruze."_ And behind the grin in his laugh, his voice is trembling with some unfathomable emotion, as if Law had presented him all the sun and stars and the world on a silver platter, as if to him this is some elation beyond measure.

He hugs Law very tightly. Law’s arms hang limp at his sides for only a moment, before he turns his cheek against the rough texture of bandages, scoots closer to put his arms around Cora-san’s neck.

“Don't be so sappy, you dumb clown,” he mutters. But there’s no heat behind it at all.

He closes his eyes to Cora-san’s laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes:  **Aishiteru,** in Japanese society, is an extremely rare way of saying  _ I love you _ , mainly because of how massive and loaded the connotations behind it are. It’s basically the pinnacle of a love declaration, in essence translating to: “ _ I love you so much I cannot possibly imagine life without you.” _
> 
> It’s not the kind of language thrown around in everyday situations, and culturally, it's never used casually. But this _is_ the original word Oda used when Rocinante told Law “I love you” in the manga. Law, being a kid, has never really heard of this word before. He thinks it’s just Cora being a sappy dork — he doesn’t quite get the full connotations behind it — thus the almost clumsy repetition. To just hammer in just how heavy Aishiteru is as a confession, even in One Piece, the only other time it’s been used is by Ace at his death. 
> 
> [HERE's](http://dragon6125.tumblr.com/post/138063374971/i-was-working-on-my-japanese-homework-when-i-had-a) a post by a guy who explains it more in depth.


	7. Trafalgar III

The scrape of the door. Nightshift lights. Crimson garnish that strikes metallic reflections. Bepo’s voice enters and recedes, a distorted fracture in the distance. The hallway moves, a sideways jerk.  

Or perhaps it’s Law that moves. He doesn't care either way. As long as he is out of the operating room the specifics are insignificant. Holes are tunnelling through the edges of his vision, black and blotchy like the remnants of flame through paper. The hallway wavers even as it progresses, every _clack_ of Law’s heel a drumroll in thunder. His heartbeat is a seismic wave. His mouth is dryer than the ash of bones. The amount of effort it takes to breathe is tremendous, absurd.

Law has not had a trauma-induced panic attack since he was fourteen years old and he does not plan on having one today. Despite the actual fucking apparently _timetravelling_ — no.

His jaw clenches.

No. _Don’t think about it._

He needs a fight. He needs a dissection. He needs a _pertinent distraction._ Something to keep his hands and mind occupied; something to prevent the latter from straying circles and the former from slamming a hole in his own ship, because at current moment that is a _very real possibility._ Something violent; because violence is what Law was taught and has never forgotten, and at this point is so integral to his defense mechanisms he can barely separate the connotation. Best case scenario Law gets a live vivisection. Considering current whereabouts three hundred leagues beneath sea level on a ship with crew and allies only, that’s likely to happen, however.

A fight, then. A dissection.

Beyond the blue-screen of his own thoughts noradrenaline is already shuttering through Law’s system. The checklist is near textbook. Increased heart rate and clammy hands; the sympathetic nervous system over-riding parasympathetic pathways. Fight or flight response long since initiated, and Law is _very_ bad at fleeing.

He finds Roronoa in the training rooms.

Roronoa is near permanently stationed in the training rooms; less possibly for training, more possibly for quiet. Half a haki sweep and a _shambles_ Law can’t quite remember through the haze of incoherency later, Law is near on top of him. Roronoa rolls out of the way at the last second, going into a lazy crouch against the row of weights. He wasn't actually asleep; just a dozing pretense of it. An empty beer bottle and half a sea-king steak is pushed against the wall.

One eye flicks open. Roronoa squints, marginally, and then frowns. “Huh. You look like shi—”

 _“Spar,_ ” grits out Law, which is all the warning Roronoa gets before Kikoku slides out from her sheath with a hiss.

Not that Roronoa requires a warning. He ducks the first swing and is sliding up with the hilt of Shusui rising for an uppercut on the unsheath. Law’s _room_ has long since been activated however; he switches himself behind Roronoa with a dumbbell that clatters to the padded ground, brings the full force of his nodachi swinging down with his entire weight behind it, gets blocked, the scrape of steel on steel, Roronoa bringing twin blades up high.

Then he twists the blades in a way that forces Law to disengage, and uses the split-second needed to re-orientate to press forwards. Steel flashes; Haki darkening black along the metal. The concentration of battle narrows Roronoa's eye. He gives half a shrug, as if shaking off whatever earlier question. And then the ghost of a smirk settles on his face as he forces Law back three successive slashes.

“Well, since you asked.”

Law didn’t, actually, but for a swordsman’s greeting just showing up possibly counts. He neither cares nor dwells on it. Both the need to rip something apart by the seams and the need to _not think_ is excruciating. The only thing in Law’s head is red and steel; red and thunder. The bite of cold, the rustle of feathers. Pink and black; black and _red._

As distractions go, Roronoa is bar none.

Sparring Roronoa in an enclosed space takes up every iota of Law’s frazzled attention and then some, which is a fact he knows well from precedence. Usually Law enjoys sparring Roronoa. Amongst his own crew Ikkaku is the only one who can match Law in swordsmanship, but that’s with Room off, so Roronoa is a exhilarating challenge. Three hundred leagues below sea level and kept alive only through the very shearable walls of the Polar Tang, Law has to be extremely careful in monitoring both himself and his opponent, even as he tries to lunge for the split-second weaknesses in Roronoa's guard. There’s no room to think of anything else. In pure swords mastery Roronoa is a good grade better than Law; his killing intent, even under restrictions, is like a knife-honed edge.

And his grin is like a blade. There is a very real possibility of getting a limb cleaved off even in a spar. Roronoa is not one to hold back when faced with a skilled opponent.

Which is why Law had chosen him. Along with the fact he’s one of the ship's sole  occupants that can match Law in combat prowess, and one of the sole occupants unlikely to ask questions or express any measure of panic or worry or sympathy, which Law decidedly cannot handle right now. Or maybe it’d just been because Roronoa had registered to be awake at what was possibly two in the morning. Logic had been one force _not_ driving Law’s actions.

Spinning, he slides past a swinging right from Wado-ichimonji, then side-steps twice to put distance again between himself and Roronoa. Roronoa is faster; Law’s reach is longer, more versatile with _Room_ activated. The training room is large enough for him to capitalize on this advantage.

Law drops the rack of weights straight over Roronoa’s head as a distraction.

Roronoa _blurs_ —

And Law’s sweeping Kikou down, left, _up_ sideways at a slant,, only for Roronoa to meet it easily, the light in his sole eye distinctly feral and distinctly pleased, using that split-second where Law overreaches to sweep his feet from right—

“ _Shambles.”_

And Roronoa is out of range, again. And bouncing back like a demented pinball without a moment’s pause. Fighting him really does take up every single spare inch of Law’s concentration, which is how it should be. Law uses Kikoku’s crossguard to halt the overhead strike, feels his own mouth pull, sideways, into a habitual smirk through the haze of narrow-space combat, slides his heel sideways to go for a haki-infused palm strike now that Roronoa is in range and his own nodachi is presently occupied fending off the katana in Roronoa’s mouth. Roronoa kicks off —

 _— Twists_ —

And gets first blood.

Just a thin, narrow slash along Law’s bicep. Muscle memory lends Law to carve Kikoku through the air in a diagonal arc that sends Roronoa backflipping to the ceiling before it even registers. And then it does register. Just not as pain. Not even as habitual competitive irritation. Just—  sight. Scent. The splattering of red against the background shimmer of _Room._ Metallic copper against senses sharpened to near-abrasive heights.

The red, and the blue. Surgery room colours. Blood underneath disinfectant. Blood stained on the bone.

One blank moment where everything in Law’s head snaps white —

And then the world that has reordered itself to crystal for the duration of the spar cracks down the middle like an egg smashed onto concrete. In the aftermath the running yolk of Law’s thoughts can only scramble itself back to one thing. Which is that blood that red is like arterial spray. Red on blue is Cora-san’s beating heart held between Law’s gloved hands. The nick on the left ventricle — thank god not the aorta, thank god not the superior vena cava. Pulmonary lacerations like punch-out stars. The bullet wounds.

Red stitches. Red stained bone. Ribcage curving inwards, some fragmented collases.

How arterial red is the colour of Cora-san’s eyes—

And then Law’s back is slamming into the padded wall and Roronoa’s sword is going for his throat at ballistic speeds.

He _shambles_ himself out of the way at the last second, blinking back the red, blinking away white-crackle stars. The landing isn’t organized; he doesn’t stumble only by virtue of instinctive balance. Looks up, to see that the button of his collar has taken the brunt of the damage, speared through and pinned against the blue matts of the gym wall. Roronoa spins on the balls of his feet, eyes narrowing.

There is literally no room for any diversion in attention. Law cannot afford it.Law cannot be thinking of anything else.

Law came searching for this fight specifically to prevent himself from thinking _,_ period.

Which is why it’s spectacularly frustrating that it doesn’t work.

Roronoa bunches like a spring and leaps like a tiger. It still takes every ounce of effort for Law to match the lightning deliverance of his bladework, savagely powerful and extortionately precise, but now an equal share is put into sheer repression, which is a detail Law had expected the fight to handle _for him._ The sense memory is like a deluge. Just the memory is a deluge, the understanding that it exists. _Focus._ He clenches his teeth hard enough to hear the creak of his jaw.

His arm throbs, still not-quite healed. _Focus._

Fucking Doflamingo and—

 _Focus on anything and everything but_ **_that._ **

It’s an impossibility.

The knowledge is a needlepoint. To not be reeled in is like not sliding on a frictionless plane, like dodging gravity. Mathematically impossible and impractical both, despite how Law needs, grimly and feverishly, for it to be possible. It’s like trying to ignore Doflamingo while unfortunately existing in the same room, an occurrence that has fortunately only happened once at that first Warlord meeting; needles sliding under his skin and the simmer of overwhelming feeling in his stomach, incoherence in his head, except on the polar opposite of the emotional spectrum.

After the initial lapse the fight does not actually last long.

Law ducks a low swing that just narrowly does not bisect his neck from the rest of his body. The shift in his center of gravity puts him at  a disadvantage; in one swift movement Roronoa slides a booted foot into Law’s instep, yanks, uses the moment of vertigo-balance to slam Law’s sword arm up against the wall, puts his own sword up against Law’s throat.

Of course, half a blink of a _shambles_ is all Law needs to transfer Kikoku to his non-dominant hand and leverage her, precisely, against Roronoa’s.

Theoretically the positioning is also more than close enough for Law to tap Roronoa’s chest and slide his heart right out onto the ground, or tap his chest and deliver a miniature gamma knife which would frazzle his insides to organ hotpot. But their spars are restricted in ability; basics of Room only for Law, up to two-sword style only for Roronoa, nothing overtly destructive for either of them.

And at the moment there’s a more pressing issue than who’s winning anyways.

Because

_heat_

Too close

The exhale of Roronoa’s breath against the shell of Law’s ear, and —

Law’s personal space is carefully cultivated, rarely disturbed. If disturbed, the offender tends to be removed with _prejudice._ Of course, circumstances such as sparring do not count. And it’s not as if the Strawhats understand personal space in the first place. Roronoa has slung an arm around Law’s shoulders to trap him during festivities more than once, has gotten closer during previous sparring sessions. That’s not the point. The point is that the last point of close contact Law had was—

Roronoa smells like musk and sweat and the saccharine tang of fruit beer, which is the only type of beer Law’s crew keeps on board.

He does not smell like smoke.

Which is why it’s completely ludicrous. Which is moot point.  Which is — Mathematical impossibility, Law sliding backwards. Sense memory, still fresh. Gold hair and the smoke and the laugh against his throat; _heat, an indication of life;_ feathers rustling like thirteen years coming backwards —

Every minute muscle in Law's body _locks_.

— Law’s hand around that bandaged wrist, the sunrise smile. This is a dream, this is a wish, this is his —

 _Law, s_ ays Cora-san.

— Impossibility.

Roronoa disengages just as Law snaps back into the crystal present with a wrench, fingers on Kikoku spasming once before they clench tight enough to press indents on the hilt.

Steel rasps in the dim quiet. Roronoa steps backwards, sheathing his katanas with a frown. The sole eye is narrowed.

“Right,” he says, after a beat. “T’s over. I win.”

Stars and smoke and _gold_ and —

“What,” says Law.

“T’s over.” Roronoa bends down to retrieve, in order, the beer bottle, and his half-eaten plate of chicken. “There’s no point if you’re distracted to hell.”

The instinctual waspish snap on his tongue is an enormous lie. Law respects Roronoa well enough to — actually no. Law respects _no one_ well enough to, at current moment,  tip himself back off that particular cliff. It's not as if Roronoa wouldn’t have noticed anyway; he has the perception of a knife’s edge and the subtlety of an anvil.

Law’s eyes narrow. “I still made you work for it.”

Roronoa snorts. “Not the past fifteen minutes you haven’t.”

He tilts his head. The earrings clink, a refraction in the light. For a second he looks like he’s about to add something else, possibly a question, still frowning, before he turns. “It’s six in the morning,” he says bluntly. “I’m gonna get breakfast.”

And then he leaves.

There is one split moment of completely irrational anger watching him go. In the elastic stretch of those seconds  all Law wants is to slice apart _everything:_ Roronoa and the gym mats and the Polar Tang and the world entire. And he hasn’t had temper problems like this since he was thirteen either, at least not so undirected.  Rage funnels ash and heat under his skin, hisses through his head, and by the time he’s once again blinking himself back past the deluge of sheer emotion Roronoa is gone.

Law eyes the door to the gym. Haki tells him Roronoa is descending the stairs to the kitchen.

Law’s heart rate does not decrease.

He considers — the stairs. Roronoa. No. The idea is discarded.

He licks his teeth. He scrubs a hand through the sweat-matted hair at his temple. Kikoku returns to her sheath with a snap, fluffy white guard slung against Law’s shoulder, hilt braced against the wall. Law straightens.

And then realizes, kind of blankly, that he can’t feel his legs.

A spar with Roronoa should not have warranted that.

Thirty hours awake, followed by an eight hour surgery with _room_ activated all the while because of _time traveling — no, don’t think about it —_  patients, interluded only by brief naps when Dressrosa's injuries still haven't healed, though.

Law sits down. It feels like being dumped out of a castle keep.

Again, and in hindsight, it’s good that it was Roronoa.

Unlike virtually everyone else, Roronoa asks no questions, at least not within the topic of emotions and otherwise, despite the evident recognition of Law being in a state. Which is why Law likes him; which is why Law had seeked him out. Nothing of pity or concern. Law’s crew would have respected him enough to give him space; he’s still in no mood to see the expressions on their faces.

It is probably a very good thing that Strawhat is not on Law’s ship right now.

Law considers that option blankly, and then shuts it down. He has bigger— Timetravelling—

A hand spasms. _Don’t think about it._

He cannot. He literally, physically, cannot. It’s an impossibility.

Law closes his eyes. He reopens them. Sweat is cooling over his skin. Kikoku's sheath divets under his fingers.

He breathes. The air is dry, with an edge of iron.

The world has stopped wavering at its edges. The spar did its job, at least momentarily. His surroundings are solid. His surroundings are tactile. His heart is still a drumroll; that’s expected, traces of noradrenaline leaving his system.

He can breathe. So.

Remove the mental wrench, very, very carefully.

And understand that

Somewhere on the other end of the Polar Tang

is

_Cora-san._

Law’s jaw clenches even as he stares into space. The presence is laser-guided in his Haki sight. A subconscious pinpoint. No longer in the operating theater. Situated along the row of spare bunkrooms instead.

Alive. And here. _Alive and here._

And exactly as Law had last seen him. Thirteen years had dulled the memory of his colours, faded the particular register of his voice. But that last smile, the way his hair had matted bloody to his temple— Law cannot forget the snapshot of that moment if he’d wanted to. The bite of snow, the susurration of feathers. Brickdust eyes and yellowed bruises.

He’d looked _exactly_ the same.

_Because Timetravel._

It is actually the most ridiculous thing. The ope-ope no mi does not work like that. Law knows. Law has every recorded account of the Fruit’s powers collected in his cabin. Law has thirteen years of extremely dubious experimentation, and the ope-ope no mi does not, cannot, break _time-space._

... Expect when it fucking does, apparently.

By a version of his thirteen year old self who’d had it in his dying clutches for a whole half hour, and who’d somehow transported Cora-san across the continuum of _?????_ straight to the operating theatre of the sole doctor this side of Paradise capable of the surgeries. He should not under any circumstances have been able to do that. There’s no fucking way. It couldn’t have even been a clean time-hop or else _Law,_ present, adult, wouldn’t exist right now. He’d had the fruit _half an_ _hour —_

The thought slams up against a brick wall.

— Because Law had had _his_ fruit for a near whole day before everything had gone to absolute shit. Which. That—  Discrepancies? Sideways travel. _Parallel dimensions_. Those are recorded phenomenon; this is the Grandline. Stranger things exist. Not this, obviously, because the boy still _shouldn’t have been able to do that_ , unless the fruit itself is a different model, unless there'd been something in the water, unless the Polar Tang had passed by the Giant Mystic Universal Access Ports of _what_ _the actual fucking fuck._

Law thinks, kind of blankly, that he needs to scream.

He doesn’t.

His head feels tipped full of static noise. Cold. The confines of the treasure chest. Cora-san, looking _exactly_ the same. Gold and red, gold and blood. The black silhouetted against the snow. Cora-san’s palm, very warm against Law’s cheek. Pressing their foreheads together, his smile very soft, saying, _hey, Law --_

“Captain? You there?”

Law jerks, slams his shoulder against the padded wall. His head swivels. His haki sense is still fixed firmly in that distant bunkroom.

Bepo, wearing oven mitts and holding a giant pot with a cafeteria tray balanced on top, shifts on hesitant toes at the door. For a second he just peers in. Then he enters, padding around the scattered dumbells and a few slashed up matts.

“Hey,” he says.

Law’s head thunks back to the wall.

Company. Amazing.

He's in exactly no state of mind to entertain anything of questions or concern. He considers telling Bepo to leave.

Bepo respects Law enough to do so for… five minutes.

Before he comes back with possibly more soup than the current giant container he’s carrying.

At least, Law reflects blankly, it’s not as if Bepo hasn’t already seen him in the clutches of complete and utter blue-screen indignity. Thinking the entirety of the last twenty four hours was either sleep-deprived delirium, or a dream. He’d… needed Cora-san to try and talk him out of it, hadn’t he.

Law wonders if Bepo brought Jean Bart’s vodka stash with him.  

Bepo is a furnace of clean fur and orange jumpsuit sitting down, setting the pot and tray down on the matts in front of Law with a thump. The tray is revealed to have, in order; tea, rice balls, sauce-glazed sea-king, and no vodka. Law stares at the tea as if his glare can transform it magically into pure ethanol.

Bepo removes the tray from where it’s capping the cast iron pot, peels off his oven mitts, and then procures a ladle and a soup bowl. “Zoro-san said you were here,” he says, by way of explanation.

Law blinks once. A pinch of irritation needles at him through the blankness.

Apparently Roronoa’s tactile agreement to neither acknowledge nor discuss Law’s emotional state does not extend to not pointing other people in Law’s direction, to acknowledge and discuss Law’s emotional state. “Ah.”

Bepo ladles the soup and sets it in front of Law. Saury and vegetables and three kinds of pepper. Riceballs on another plate. The grilled sea-king. Theoretically these are his favourites. In practice Law thinks the only way he’d get them down would be in very small bites, to be regurgitated in the immediate future. The magic alcohol is still, regretfully, not appearing.

“You should eat captain,” says Bepo with reproach.

Law’s nose wrinkles.

“I’m serious. You haven’t eaten in _forever_. And you just did the surgery. That must have taken a lot of energy. How about just a little. Clione made all your favourites, see?”

Law does see. Why is Clione awake at six in the morning. He regards the spread indifferently, before glancing up again. Bepo stares at him. Law stares back, face locked in unreadable moue.

After a moment of deadlocked staring, Bepo starts, slowly. “... Do you wanna talk about i—”

 _“No._ ”

Silence.

“Okay,” says Bepo, and scoots a little closer, so Law can feel his familiar radiating warmth. “You really should eat, though.”

Law makes a noise that can charitably called a grunt.

“Or sleep?” considers Bepo. “Although you just slept. You haven’t been sleeping well either, you know. You should probably stop drinking so much coffee. I think Ikkaku’s going to replace the entire stash with Decaf if you keep this up.”

Law would trade his arm and all the caffeine in the world for a bottle of 88% proof Alabastan Vodka, or perhaps a  North Blue Sunset rum with equal ethanol content. He tells Bepo this in the same monosyllabic grunt that’s likely to be his only method of communication in the near future.

Bepo pauses.

“Uh. I think Shachi just chugged all of Ikkaku’s.”

“Jean bart,” says Law, still staring at the tea in grim concentration. The chamiole trails vapour.

Bepo taps a paw against his side. His chin comes to rest on Law’s head as he says, dubiously, “We spent all of his at the party on Zou. He still has the fruit beers though? And Penguin’s always got wine somewhere.”

Nevermind.

“I mean, if you _really_ need it I’m sure we can get it, captain. Even though drinking on an empty stomach is bad for you.” This is said in the doubtful tone that is Bepo’s version of pointed rebuke.  “I mean. After that….” Law twitches. Bepo trails off.

The conversation lurks at the metaphorical edge of the Sea-king infested waters.

The pause is only for a brief moment though, before a giant paw slides something white and fluffy and spotted from one pocket, to be deposited in Law’s lap.

Law stares at his hat.

Then he cranes his neck up at Bepo, who brackets both paws around Law’s ribcage and tightens slowly, reeling Law into his marshmallow fur and thus completing the very sneaky, squishy hug.

He says, not quite looking down at Law, “We cleaned things up, you know.” And beyond the contemplative edge of his voice there’s a thread of anxiety. He speaks quickly. “Uh. Sort of. The operating theatre’s still kind of blanketed. But this. And— them. They couldn’t be sleeping in the theatre you know. Especially that cold table, but we didn’t have anywhere with all the right equipment to put them. So I woke— well, Shachi _already_ woke Penguin and Unni and half the crew up. We ended up rewiring one of the old bunks.”

Law noticed. Gold, in his mind. Close enough he see the brittle edges of the bandage outlines through haki-sense.

Bepo lowers his chin a little further over Law’s head and finishes: “And I got them both food. Clione made too much for the mini-captain. But we figured you needed to eat too, anyway. So.”

The bearhug squeezes tighter; it’s like being cocooned by a living mattress. Law inhales through the nose and gets a mouthful of fur and coconut shampoo.

“... I saw Roci-san’s medical chart,” says Bepo.

The muscle spasm is entirely unintentional. It happens anyway.

A little blankly, Law wonders how much Bepo has guessed.

Law hasn’t ever _told_ anyone of Cora-san. Law has not told anyone much of anything: not of his past with Doflamingo, and definitely not of the white crystalline city of Flevance now present only in textbook margins. These are secrets folded away in the recesses of his mind, to be buried. They have no place amongst water and air. But Bepo has been with him the longest. Bepo has been with him since when Cora-san’s death was still a gaping chasm of a wound, only days after Minion island tore yet another future away from Law’s hands. Law has never actually deigned to share, but through just proximity and Law’s screaming year of nightmares at thirteen Bepo has to have put s _ome_ of the pieces together. About who Cora-san was. About how Cora-san died.

Gold. The presence is a lantern light in his mind, a flickering beacon. If Law concentrates he can reach out and _touch_ it.  

“But they’re gonna be alright now you know?” continues Bepo. “They both are. You did super, captain. Not that you ever do anything less than. Especially with Roci-san.”

Who is here. Who is alive.

Who is... _not a hallucination._

Bepo takes one look at Law’s face and his voice turns in a way that says he’s trying exponentially to be reassuring.

“Uh, Penguin's with them right now! Don’t worry.” Law _isn’t_. Law has no idea what he’s feeling at current moment. “And I think Clione's gonna take next shift. And then Unni. And the crew’s, uuuuh, it’s kinda hard to explain the time-travel, but they _love_ mini-captain already. And Roci-san by like. Default! Nothing’s gonna touch them here, okay? We’ll put anything that tries into the spare body-parts bin, you can count on it. And everyone will help! The Strawhats. And the minks. And the samurai guys you picked up at Dressrosa—”

 _Ah,_  thinks Law. _Dressrosa_.

Few specifics of the conversation has actually slipped through. The wardrum of one fact overrides everything else in Law’s head. Gold and red. _He’s alive._ But this last bit, intermixed with a resolution like an echo; the _nothing will touch them, nothing will touch him,_ circles, snaps taunt, clicks into place like a lead bullet in a barrel.

Every single nerve in Law’s body _lights_ as if scraped with electric wire.

Because Dressrosa. And _Doflamingo._

That Doflamingo is not actually dead is an unfortunate fact Law has _resolutely not been thinking about_ for his own sanity. Except for now. He's very much thinking about it now. How Doflamingo is not dead in World Government custody. The same World Government which had let Flevance burn, let Lami burn, let Law's parent's burn over a senseless vapid lie.

Doflamingo who had once said: _nothing will touch him, he’s my little brother, after all_.

The thoughts churn. Incoherent. Completely coherent. They pile like dominoes and fall like a poorly constructed tower.

Doflamingo who's alive in Impel down, long since proven itself not to be impervious to jailbreak. Doflamingo who's allied with Kaidou, who Law is currently on route to take down. Kaidou the Emperor, Kaidou who fucking wrecked Zou for the Samurai currently on Law’s ship. Doflamingo whom Strawhat took down. Straw Hat, who’s currently on collision course with another Emperor, and what are the chances that he fucking comes out of that without brutally offending Big Mom, best case scenario, _zero percent._

And Cora-san is here. Cora-san is alive. Cora-san is in a spare bunk-room on Law’s submarine and _not a hallucination._ The surgery details slam back red-light, Cora-san alive by the skin of his fucking _teeth._  The lower left ventricle, nicked, the gastrointestinal tract, nicked; the shattered stained pieces of his ribcage; the ruin of his chest cavity, bruises at his throat. Law, holding his beating heart between gloved hands thinking _no no no you will not stop._  Red and gold. Gold and blood. Law’s thoughts are a sliding avalanche, the drop of a single pin in an otherwise empty room.

Because Cora-san is alive. And Doflamingo is alive. And Law is a absolute _dimwit_ currently on route to Wano and _Kaidou_ with Cora-san on his ship and _Strawhat 100% pissing off another Emperor —_

He doesn’t know what kind of noise he makes. He can’t think. He can’t _breathe_.

He needs to go and _kill Doflamingo—_

A mug of lukewarm tea upends itself over Law’s head.

“Captain. _Captain.”_

Water sluices down Law's hair, drips down his chin. He blinks twice. Very slowly.

Bepo’s panicked face swims back into view. He’s facing Law, shaking him by the shoulders. And Law himself is no longer sitting. He doesn’t know when that happened.

At the edges of his haki sense — _Gold._

Law licks the chamiole off his lips.

And says the only coherent thought in his head, which is: “I need to go to Impel Down and kill Doflamingo.”

Bepo stares at him and his crazy eyes.

“... Right.”

A pause.

“Okay. You know what. Captain. Lemme just—“

Two minutes later Law’s somehow in the kitchen, half his crew asking fuzzy white-noise questions in the background while Bepo lines up Jean Bart’s emergency stash on the table in front of him, Sunset Rums and Alabastan vodkas and one very small glass bottle of absinthe. Law downs the absinthe in one grim gulp without even feeling the burn. Not _quite_ what he was asking for, but given current circumstances at least it takes the edge off.

Cora-san is alive. Cora-san is here. His presence is gold as an anchor weight in Law's mind. Doflamingo needed to be dead three weeks ago, preferably thirteen years ago.

And Kaidou.

And _Strawhat._

"Right," says Law grimly into the tabletop, extending his glass. "Pour me another one."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, I'm gonna be editing later. 😅 A bit of an intermission chapter, but we're finally past the inciting incident ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Part 2, which is going to be punctuated by cute Heart-Pirate-mini-Law-Cora interactions while adult Law progresses ever closer to 100% meltdown in the background.

**Author's Note:**

> Reviews are like writings level-ups. If there's anything you liked, do tell me in the comments!


End file.
